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The Albanian Riviera: tips, travel hints and impressions – Guest blog by AP

We left Pristina by car before the rush on a Thursday afternoon mid-May and arrived in Vlora in good time for a beach-side grilled fish supper.

Vlora’s very name sounds attractively pastoral, and the place is well-known to Kosovars as the birthplace of Albanian Independence in 1912 and was, briefly, its capital. But, bucolic it isn’t, unless you like your sea-side resorts with vast natural beaches to be lined with unfinished blocks of high-risers and fume-choking cars, that is. Better then, in 2014, a place to stop, have an ice cream and then pass through unless you are able to obtain a pass to the naval base; the Bay of Vlora became the site of a World War II German and Italian submarine base which was later expanded by the Soviet Union until Albania pulled out of the Warsaw Pact in 1961. It is still an important Albanian naval base.

Nothing had been booked beforehand, but we stayed in the ‘New York‘,  in a spacious fourth floor en suite room with a magnificent sea view terrace. Not only does the hotel offer safe parking, but it is the last one before the tunnel which takes you through the rocks to the sweep of the Albanian Riviera. We had been told that room rates can often be negotiated outside the peak tourist season of July and August, and we were lucky to be able to do just this as only eight rooms were in use. Our friend, who was travelling with us, jogged the long promenade before breakfast; he had stayed there in August last year and said that Vlora was virtually unrecognisable insofar as it was now peaceful, clean and relatively car-less.

The plan was to get a good start on the deep south coastal road immediately after breakfast the following morning, and be swimming later the same day in the Ionian Sea sailed by Odysseus. Our journey and contact with the water was rather more tame and less heroic than his, though we did swim that evening from the sandy beach at Ksamili to a couple of islands 9kms off the coast of Corfu.

Anxious about the prospect of hairpin bends, unknown road conditions and the distance to cover, I was keen to get going, and our first coffee stop was not long out of Vlora at the highest point of the Llogoraja Pass from where in silence we gazed down at the astonishingly beautiful white beach and crystalline sea, watching the swifts diving and darting between glorious flag firs.

I need not have worried, as, with the exception of buses to and from the archaeological Disneyland of Saranda, we were virtually alone on the road which was asphalted and in excellent condition all the way along the coast, and framed inland with succeeding biblical scenes of a shepherding culture. Thousands of terraced olive and lemon groves characterise this whole area and there were countless opportunities to buy fruit and oil. We drove from bay to bay, spoiled for choice about from which white beach we would dive into the sea and, after changing our minds about Dhermiu, eventually determined on an al fresco fish lunch in the central piazza at Himara, a small Albanian town set smack bang central on a beautiful sandy fishing bay which was entirely… Greek: language, colour of shutters, even the feta!

Arriving for the sunset in Ksamili, which is certainly no longer a “village”, my trusted travel book guided us to a gem of a beach bar restaurant called ‘Rilinda’ where we gorged on vats of local Butrint Bay mussels with beer, home-made chips and an enormous salad, and watched the setting sun.

Our small Hotel Artur, set on the edge of one of the tiny but impeccable sandy beaches nearby, cost €25, with breakfast. The adjacent, largely open-to-the-elements night club must surely, however, be more than just an irritation when it operates during the season.

The next day, after returning to the gorgeous beach bar for some proper matinal downtime sunning and swimming, we headed to Butrint, and, with Aurora as our official, but pay-me-as-much-as-you-wish guide, we wandered mesmerised all afternoon the UNESCO World Heritage Site dating from the Homeric era. One of the vast stone gates is called the Scaean, or Lake Gate, which is referred to in the Aeneid! It’s the sort of place that can be enjoyed by a young family with small children able to run safely amok among the ruins in and out of the shade of, inter alia, and rather bizarrely, eucalyptus and oak.

It put me in mind of the Simpson’s episode of the Odyssey, where Homer plays his namesake. Here, in this one magnificent site, can be seen the remains of Greek, Roman, Medieval and Renaissance civilisations, and even if not very interested in archaeology, no-one can fail but to enjoy the utterly unspoilt cool and calm of this extraordinary, stunning and complex site.

Crossing the Vivari channel by cable ferry and heading off into the agricultural Eden across country, we wanted to take in the natural wonder that is The Blue Eye which is situated in a natural beauty spot off the main road to Gjirokastra, our next stop. What this tiny secluded stream and pool is like in mid-season traffic and heat, I can’t imagine, but at this time of year we virtually had it to ourselves and managed to walk there and back to the car in five minutes before sweeping up through more magnificent mountains on the way to Gjirokastra.

The autobiographical novel by Ismail Kadare, (b. 1936) entitled ‘Chronicle in Stone’, is set in the inland ancient stone-built city of Gjirokastra which was also the home of the dictator, Enver Hoxha. (1908 – 85). The UNESCO upper old town clings to the steep sides of a hill topped by a huge fortress. So close to the Greek border, it was badly mauled by several armies during WWII – Italian, Greeks (supported by the RAF who bombed it) Italians again & finally the Germans! Unsurprising then that both its sons, with names now known throughout the world, could remain indifferent to their austere birthplace, though their legacies couldn’t be more different.

Although neither Hoxha’s nor Kadare’s homes are currently open to tourists, you can stay in a similar traditional stone-towered house. The ‘Hotel Kalemi’ – don’t be put off by this advertising-strewn website – has the original double guest room of the fortified home and it still has its beautiful 200 year-old carved ceiling.  Staying here was one of the highlights of my time in this region and it chimed perfectly with passages in Kadare’s book, particularly those opening pages about the flood of piped mountain rainwater which ran along the stone roof and down into the massive cistern under the house. For €25 we slept there under the huge wooden attic beams similar to those where the young boy in the novel creeps to secretly watch his grandparents’ young woman tenant perform her toilette. We ate breakfast of omelette to order, feta and homemade fig jam, in the stone-chilled room immediately above the cistern, which remains the source of water for the house. The large house key, the narrow defensive musket slits either side of the thick main door, the traditional wooden door bars of this huge, four storied vertical kulla-inspired home with its Mostar-like stone roofs was as much an atmospheric as a physical phenomenon, and it is sad to see many of these traditional homes in ruin for want of investment in this remarkable place.

A well-known restaurant in Boston (Massachusetts), sports the name ‘Vlora’. I haven’t eaten there but with lamb, pita and tava on the menu it’s easy to see which country inspires the fare. It also offers rice balls. Now I wouldn’t necessarily think of rice balls as an Albanian dish however, qifqi, or warm rice balls fried in herbs and egg, is a delicious south western Albanian speciality, and I sampled them in the delightful family-run restaurant of ‘Kujtimi’ outside in an ancient square under the plane trees in Gjirokastra on the night of the Eurovision song contest, though most of the local residents couldn’t have cared less about that. We three ate a range and variety of local dishes for a total 2,700 lek with 1€ at 140 lek, an exchange rate virtually unchanged since 2012.

A climb to the daunting and dark vaulted citadel the next day provided us with picture-perfect panoramas of snow-capped mountains and the expanse of fertile agricultural plain through which ran the main north-south road to Greece. To the north, however, are the communist blocks of flats and unchecked urban sprawl which may account for the 15 year moratorium in granting Gjirokastra UNESCO status only achieved in 2005.

Talking to the owners of the Kalemi house, it became clear that there is so much more of interest in this area, and I vowed to return properly equipped and with time to hike to Antigonea and to find the extraordinary city of Hadrianopolis which, though built between AD 117 -138, was only excavated in 2002 following a landslide in the Drinos Valley in the 1970’s.

We wended our way back north through ever more spectacular mountainous and valley scenes, like a place time forgot, one of which is on the cover of the current Bradt Guide, inadvertently following in the footsteps of Byron and the infamous Ali Pasha. Only when we much later reached the more gentle Adriatic coast and stood on Gjiri Lazlit Beach to take in the reddening sky in the gloaming before the final push on the drive home to Pristina, did I begin to reflect on what a terrific country is Albania.

For further information see also:

freytag & berndt road map of Albania (NB there is a very useful new motorway from Fier to Vlora, as yet unmarked on their latest map)

Bradt Travel Guide 4th edition 2012

‘Chronicle in Stone’ by Ismail Kadare (1971)

Albania in a few videos:

Albania from the sky

Mix of coastal scenes

Blue Eye between Saranda and Delvina

A link to old submarines in the Pashaliman (Orikum) together with recent footage of an exercise with the Royal Marines

Also an archive of this base

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Blog Archives

Eye mantra saved me

Magic key to handle your beloved

Reflect the energy of love and sympathy

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Eye Care Mantras:

Learn to manage your fears:

ADVANTAGE Acceptance:

Office politics

Reach up, when you are going down

Eating less crying more

To handle debts easily

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International CEOs were hooked to her speech:

To create a better future look back and not forward:

When somebody has one problem after another non-stop:

Loans please leave me alone:

Crystal clear solutions:

Poverty, please stay away from my friend:

Rude boss becomes Appreciating boss

Not getting any results

Choose the right course

Increase the effect of chanting

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Inner Smile Brings an Outer Smile:

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It is His Responsibility:

Manage your bosses and coworkers:

How to handle your karma:

Finding One’s Purpose In Life:

Make them pay my money

Ultimate Anti-Debt Mantra

Harassed for not paying the loan

Debts! Many thanks to you!!

Angel to handle your debts

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Getting Back Your Dues:
Putting you in a better financial position:
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Wipe Your Debts – financial and karmic nature:
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Love follows without fail

Forgive Your Ancestors

How to handle sexual harassments?

Need an extension for my husband’s project

To communicate with Naran S. Balakumar or have an appointment with him, please send your emails to:

Find Divine Light

Gem Remedies, Animal Guides and Flowers 8th, December-2012

Workshop by Naran S Balakumar

Bach Flower Remedies – Session – III

Two sessions are not enough to cover the ocean of Bach flowers. Life is so complicated that we need to know how to manage them with the help of divine flowers. In this session some more remedies will be taken for discussion.

Please note that you needn’t have attended the previous sessions to attend this workshop.

Animal Spirit Guides

A fox could help us to get us a Visa, but do you know that it can help us to handle abusive situations, where you don’t know how to come out of it! Like that different aspects of Animal Spirit Guides that hasn’t been discussed before will be dealt with during this session.

Manual for Animal Spirit Guides will be provided to the participants of the workshop

Gem Remedies

In general, gem remedies are prescribed one at a time. But do you know that we can combine them to handle different life situations. This session will deal with various combinations of gem remedies that can be used as saviours in today’s rushed and pushed world.

Workshop Details

Venue:  Bach Flower Study Centre, New No.28, Sivaji Street, T. Nagar, Chennai – 17, Near T. Nagar Bus Terminus (no parking place)

Date:  Saturday 8th-December-2012, 10 AM to 4 PM (including Lunch and Snacks)

Fee:  Rs. 1200/-

Contact: Shobana – 9884301634.

Confirm your attendance by calling up Shobana or send an email to:

Workshops in Bangalore, April 2012

By Naran S. Balakumar
Bach Flower Therapy

The course covers:

Basics of Bach Flower Remedies, When do we use them, and How to use them?

How to use special combinations of remedies for various life situations: marriage, attending interviews, emergencies like accidents and surgeries, harmony, preparing for exams, skin problems etc.

Learn how to: use pictures of Bach Flower Remedies, circle technique, chanting and other such special techniques.

Date:                     28.04.2012,         Time:                     10.00 AM to 1 PM

Naran’s Multi-dimensional Healing Practices

This course is conducted for the first time, in the city of Bangalore. It covers the entire spectrum of Naran’s healing practices. The emphasis will be more on simple techniques and tools to handle your day-to-day problems and issues. The course covers:

  •          Healing Mantras
  •          Switch Words
  •          Mudras
  •          Gem Remedies
  •          Animal Spirit Guides
  •          Guided Meditation

Date:                     29.04.2012,         Time:                     10.00 AM to 1 PM

Workshop Details

Fees: Rs 2000/- for the two-day course

Contact: Anitha – 9845846849 (Bangalore),   Shobana – 9884301634 (Chennai),  Ravi – 9916813601 (Bangalore)

 Venue:  TSK School of Music, Shastry Sabhangana, 895/1 SKANDA,  14th Cross, Mahalakshmi Layout, Bangalore – 560 086

Please note that Products of Naran will be available during the workshops

CDs and Books of Naran

Pills of Bach Flower Remedies, Gem Remedies

Pictures – Bach Flower Remedies, Gem Remedies, The Mother’s Flowers and Animal Spirit Guides

Love Thanks Divine

Switch words, the Mantras in English

Discussed on 16th of July, during the workshop by Naran

BE a gene-CHANGER and re-write your karma as well as your life during the process

Regain your lost LOVE and achieve harmony in family

When there is no solution to a problem, how to CONCEDE and find the path to your solution CLEAR by going to the CENTRE of the problem

Improve your POINT of vision and solve eye-related problems

REACH your destination/ goals in HALF the time

Gain things you have never enjoyed, regain those you have enjoyed in the past and FIND a way to them

Attract people to you like black-HOLE and find your Mr. Right

Switch words to get 1) First Rank in studies 2) Job Promotion 3) MOVE from a world of Impossible to a World of Possibility

Getting co-operation from your colleagues by working TOGETHER towards a common goal

FIND a (DIVINE) ORDER in a situation that you are not able to handle by gaining confidence and capability to handle them

BE in optimal health

HOLD onto your values as well as make your children and spouse stick to them

Switch words for 1) Travel Mantra 2) Anti-Depressant 3) Lucky Charm 4) Work-Life Balancer 5) Child-bearing

Combine Switch words with Tapping (EFT), Bach Flower Remedies, Animal spirit guides

Living with Awareness Workshop 23rd April 2011

To know more about Living with Awareness, please check the blog:

Why Do We Need to Live with Awareness?

They are keys to your emotional freedom. They help you to understand your mind, and its way of working. You learn then to guide your mind and put it into proper use. In addition, you will figure out how to rule your mind and not be ruled by it.

Living with Awareness techniques are simple and easiest LETTING GO processes that are helpful in the following Life Situations:

Goal Setting: one part of your minds wants to go for it and another part of your mind doesn’t want it. Learn how to handle these conflicting forces to achieve your goal.

Decision Making: become decisive in critical life situations

Cleansing the Mind: achieve relaxation and peace of mind, and get the benefits of meditation.

Breaking Habits: form life-enhancing habits, for example to sticking to your diet, or coming out of your addiction that’s putting your life into danger.

Prosperity: create success habits to enjoy wealth, health and happiness

Relationships: enjoy harmony and love in your family, marriage and work

Health: maintain supreme fitness and well-being

Workshop Details

Venue:       New No.28, Sivaji Street, T. Nagar, Chennai – 17

Date:         Saturday, 23rd April 2011

Time:         10 AM to 4.00 PM

Fees:          Rs. 850/- including lunch and snacks

Contact:     Shobana – 9884301634. Please confirm your participation before 20th April by phone or email to help us organize the workshop better.

Products Available at the Centre

– Bach Flower Meditation CD

– I Love Myself CD

– Pain Management including Back Pains CD

– Abundance CD

– Photographs of Gems, Animal Spirit Guides, Flowers

– Cutting the Ties CD

Together Love Thanks Divine!

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(video) What would Mahatma Gandhi stand for in Fiji today? Chief Guest lecture at Mahatma Gandhi Memorial High School, 2 October 2012.

Segment 1    Why are you students celebrating Gandhi’s birthday?

Segment 2    His many great admirers, outstanding leaders in their own right.

Segment 3      The many criticisms and inconsistencies of Gandhi

Segment 4       What I believe he would have stood for in Fiji today? Who would he have given his support to? Pro-democracy movements? Shamima Ali? Father Kevin Barr? Sympathy for the Methodist Church? The environmentalists?

Segment 5       Several of MGMHS alumni I have personally known- my four sisters (Padma Lal, Champa Chauhan, Mangi Tauh, Saras Narsey), and my friend of four decades (Kishor Chetty).

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Dec 21

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    Cameron has made an amazing turnaround in the last few years, this community is fortunate to have a school that is challenging and educating our youth in such positive ways!

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The Not-So-Magnificent Seven

A pretty shocking headline there I know. I’ll get better at it. Hopefully.

As I type Capello is apparently making phonecalls to the unlucky seven members of his provisional 30-man squad who will not be on the plane as part of the final 23. Obviously much hinges on the results of Gareth Barry’s fitness test which took place first thing this morning, but assuming he makes the plane, here’s the seven I’d leave at home, and why:

Leighton Baines

Steven Warnock gets the nod as cover for Ashley Cole. Baines actually had a better season, as Warnock did what all Aston Villa players do after Christmas, i.e. pretty much stopped trying, and if this were just about football would be in the final 23. However his comments last week that suggested he might struggle representing his country at the biggest tournament in world sport because he gets homesick like a big Jessie mean he misses out. Now he can spend the next six weeks wondering what might have been, but at least he’ll have his mates and a decent cup of tea.

Ledley King

Because everyone assumes that because his knees are fucked he must be basically Paul McGrath without the alcoholism. Whenever I read football writers bigging up King there’s an undercurrent of misty-eyed nostalgia, recalling those halcyon days when footballers were joiners during the week, too busy beating their wives and chainsmoking to train in between games. But no, his knees are fucked, he has the turning circle of a routemaster bus and was dumped on his arse twice by a 50-year-old Mexican striker who even West Ham think they are too good for. Plus, he’s fucking Tottenham.

Matthew Upson

I actually feel a bit bad about this as he was such a mainstay during qualification. But while England have won nine of the 11 games under Capello in which Upson has featured, only two of those wins were achieved with clean sheets, against Andorra and Slovakia. Having endured a tough season for West Ham, Michael Dawson gets the nod thanks to a consistently excellent season for Fucking Tottenham.

Tom Huddlestone

While I’m happy to be corrected, no-one’s ever won a World Cup passing exclusively sideways, turning really slowly and just sort of lumbering about the place with the look of a man who would rather have a nice sit down and a sandwich.

Scott Parker

Almost made it because of the marked decline in Carrick’s form over the second half of the season, but being the best player in the worst West Ham side for a decade is no great acclaim, and a lack of experience at this level combined with a poor disciplinary record – ten bookingss and two red cards last season – mean he stays at home.

Shaun Wright-Phillips

England are currently so well stocked for small wingers with tremendous pace and no final ball that this was a tough decision. Adam Johnson looks like he might just have the lot, so SWP stays at home for looking like he dribbles in his sleep, and also to piss off his Dad.

Darren Bent

Easy one, this. Bent might have been the second highest-scoring English striker last season, but always looks completely lost in an England shirt, like Sam from Quantum Leap just jumped into his body and has to spend 80 minutes running around pretending like he knows what he’s doing, a little run here, a hopeful flick of the boot there, a series of skied and skewed shots into the crowd in between.

So, my final 23 looks like this:

GK: Hart, James, Green

DEF: Carragher, A Cole, Dawson, Ferdinand, Terry, G Johnson, Warnock

MID: Barry, Carrick, J Cole, Gerrard, A Johnson, Lampard, Lennon, Milner, Walcott

FWD: Crouch, Defoe, Heskey, Rooney

Now let’s just hope Capello hasn’t announced his final 23 while I’ve been writing this….SUCCESS! Do let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Am I taking enough defenders? Is it too soon for Adam Johnson? Is Crouchie having his nachos? And so on.

This entry was posted in England, Group C, Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to The Not-So-Magnificent Seven

  1. Andy says:

    I’d take Shauny over Walcott. The latter just belts about the place like an excited puppy*. I’d put money on him dropping trou and dragging his hole along the floor at some point.

    *And, yes, I’m aware that this is SWP’s MO too. It’s just that he can, occasionally, hit a fucking barn door…

  2. Nathan says:

    Andy, looks like you might be onto something there. Walcott’s had a poor season but he seemed a safe bet having started against Mexico and Japan.

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Rio Out Too, By The Sounds Of It

Sigh. Twanged his knee in training under challenge from Emile Heskey. More here.

As it’s more than 24 hours before England’s first game of the tournament they can name a replacement, so just be grateful it’s happened now. One of Ferdinand and King was always going to disintegrate at some point. Michael Dawson has been put on standby and is probably pretty pleased with himself.

My bigger immediate worry is that this now passes the armband to Gerrard for the tournament. He’s coming off arguably the worst season of his career during which his limitations as a captain have become apparent. No idea who this leaves as vice-captain either.

Anyway Ferdinand’s having a scan and an FA statement is being released later on, with the BBC pretending someone has told them “it’s not looking good”.

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TabletCAD - Web based Tablet Design Software

Tablet Compression Resource (TCR) has just announced three new training opportunities coming up in 2017. TCR, a division of Natoli Engineering Company, Inc., is excited to offer these one-day, opportunities to train those in the tableting industry. These sessions include a full-day tablet manufacturing seminar, as well as open houses for formulation troubleshooting and standard operating procedure

Natoli Engineering Company announces the opening of the Natoli Institute for Industrial Pharmacy Research and Development. Opened in partnership with the Arnold and Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences on the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University (LIU), the Natoli Institute features dispensing, formulation, compression, and coating suites. Supporting one of the few

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 29, 2013 NATOLI ENGINEERING ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY To establish The Natoli Engineering Institute for Industrial Pharmacy Development and Research SAINT CHARLES, MO – Natoli Engineering and the Arnold and Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Long Island University (LIU) are pleased to announce a partnership


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Monthly Archives: July 2013

Lyme Letter Campaign Reminder

We ask for your participation in the 2013 Lyme Letter Campaign to NC Health Care Providers.  You are an NC resident who suffers from Lyme or Lyme-like Illness (or are the friend, family member or caregiver of someone with Lyme). … Continue reading

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August Support Group Dates

Our apologizes for hardly posting in July.  It has been a crazy month for several of the Lyme Leaders especially for the webmaster of NC Lyme Advocacy.  🙂  Hopefully things will get back to normal soon.  We hope to post … Continue reading

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Raleigh & Apex Group Switch Dates

If you want to come to the support group meeting in Apex, please make a note that it will be held on the 1st Sunday July 7th from 3 to 4:30 at the Eva Perry Library in the back corner … Continue reading

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Letter Writer Encourages Others to Write

One of our letter writers recently had this to say about our campaign.  It includes why she was hesitant to write and why she is ultimately glad that she got involved with our campaign.  She encourages everyone in North Carolina … Continue reading

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April 7, 2010

riding the Malaysia F1 GP

Despite a sunny Saturday, and a dry Sunday morning, I opted not to go out to ride this weekend. My failure to wake up at a reasonable hour compounded by long list of things to do forced me to stay home for most of the weekend. However, this weekend Malaysia played host to the Formula 1 race, and this meant that I was going to invest at least 5 hours this weekend watching the qualifying, pre-race, and race sessions. Maybe some multitasking is in order?

The Malaysia circuit is 5.54km(3.44miles) long and over race distance drivers on the lead lap rack up over 190 miles in 56 laps. I however only racked up 111 miles this weekend-on my trainer. And while I barely rode over half the race distance, I went farther than both the king (Michael Schumacher) and the killer (Vitaly Petrov) did in the race.

Yes, I had previously claimed that sitting on the trainer is pure torture, but if you watch something engaging on the TV, the minutes/miles do tick by. Compared to going out for a real ride, the trainer will always feel like torture, but if you have plans to park yourself on the sofa for a few hours over the weekend, you might as well get a workout from it. For me, I also got a lot of stretching done before, during, and after the rides. And to reiterate, yes I spent 6 hours on the trainer this weekend.

PS: As a bonus, workouts on the trainer produce awesome cadence graphs. Proof, proof, and more proof.
PPS: Watching Man VS. Food on the trainer is motivating.

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Nelson's log

Simple app metrics: stathat

I’m looking for some simple application metrics. I want to track some basic things like “time it takes to make an API call” and maybe “number of interesting events over time”. The big boys awhile back converged on statsd + graphite for this, or now Grafana, and those are great technologies. They’re also too complicated for my little project. I just want something simple that will work. And hopefully nicer than rrdtool+mrtg :-/

Ian D recommended StatHat so I gave it a try. It’s pretty nice. You make REST HTTP calls giving it data and it aggregates the data and makes reports. It’s pretty basic, but then it’s simple to use and requires no extra work on my part.

The biggest drawback is that it requires an HTTP call in your app, which tends to be synchronous. The supplied client libraries don’t even have timeouts! I think this can be worked around with some async or thread implementation, or maybe even an offline stats collector, but there was nothing off the shelf.

I also found posting one stat value at a time with an HTTP call is very slow. I was able to post approximately 8 records a second. And I think that’s using HTTP keepalives! Fortunately there’s a bulk import API using JSON that is much faster; about 999x faster if I insert 1000 records at a time.

Data records have an optional timestamp. Those have to be an integer. If you pass in a floating point with milliseconds like 1460076429.905 it will be silently ignored and the data will be timestamped with the current clock time instead.

The biggest problem I’ve run into is that my data is getting lost. It looks just fine when I import it, then an hour or two later my data is gone. I’ve written asking if this is something I’m doing wrong. Update: my data reappeared. There’s some confusing things that happen around updates, etc, maybe the consistency is just eventual.

Here’s a sample report. The number being measured is the milliseconds it takes for Riot’s Web API to answer a request. This tells me the average time is 320ms and it spiked around 9AM. The reported min, max, 95% and 99% don’t seem correct to me, but maybe those are describing the averages in 15 minute windows instead of individual events. (Which makes it less useful).

It’s a neat product though. I may stick with it if I can figure out the data loss problem. Sure beats setting up some complicated stuff myself.

Update: I’m using stathat in production now and am very happy with it. I just collect all the stats I care about in memory during a run of my job, then post them all at the end with a 10 second HTTP timeout. Seems to work just fine. The disappearing data problem seems to only be a temporary quirk in an initial bulk import, hasn’t been an issue since. And it’s really nice having the charts!


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Episode 017: Star Trek reboot premier (Special Edition)

We didn’t plan to make the Star Trek XI episode a “special” but it ended up being very special thanks to Michael and Roxanne who we met at a pre-opening night screening in Toronto. We brought our tricorder to record people in line’s thoughts going in, but found most nerds don’t want to have their nerdiness captured for worldwide broadcast on the intertubes. Also, there was no “line” per se as no one seemed to know the film was even opening. We had a nicely half-empty theatre to stretch out in. Afterwards, we got into Mike and Roxy’s Lumina  van to debrief on the experience, the results of which you can hear in #17  Nerd Trek The Motion Picture. They turned out to be fun people  involved with the Ad-Astra sci-fi and fantasy literature convention and not geek-nappers trolling sci-fi movies for victims.

Okay, so this is a Transport, not a Lumina, but you get the picture.

A small errata: Peter from Mediasaurs pointed out it’s a Corvette, not a Mustang in the film as I have mistakenly stated on the podcast and all over the internet. I honestly couldn’t force myself pay enough attention to that horrible scene to take note of the car. Also, I’m not the biggest car buff. It was red, right? It does make sense since Chevrolet makes the Corvette and the Lumina van. Clearly a Star Trek tie-in.

We forgot to come up with a Task for this week’s show. Go see the movie! That’s your task.

One Response to Episode 017: Star Trek reboot premier (Special Edition)

  1. […] me, and many others, the tone of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek film was entirely wrong. It’s essentially the same bro-ish tone that’s used in The […]

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Preakness Stakes 2017 Post Positions: Full Draw, Lineup For Pimlico

Always Dreaming received some good news at the drawing for Preakness Stakes post positions.

The 2017 Kentucky Derby winner will go for the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown from the fourth post position, which is considered a pretty good spot. Classic Empire, which finished fourth at Churchill Downs, will be right next to Always Dreaming in the fifth post position at Pimlico in Baltimore.

The 142nd Preakness will take place Saturday, and you can see where each horse will start below.

1. Multiplier
2. Cloud Computing
3. Hence
4. Always Dreaming
5. Classic Empire
6. Gunnevera
7. Term of Art
8. Senior Investment
9. Lookin at Lee
10. Conquest Mo Money

Click for Preakness Stakes odds >>

Thumbnail photo via Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports Images

TMZ logo

© 2018 NESN


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Topaz server issue

Dear Customers,

We are experiencing file system issue on the TOPAZ windows web server and we have reinstalled the server and currently restoring the files to the server. We assume that the estimated time of completion to be around 6 hours (2PM EST). We appreciate your patience and co-operation till the issue is resolved.

Update:  Server is back up now after the restore.

Hostdepartment Support team.

Live chat and Call support maintenance – 18th May 2013

We are currently performing maintenance on our live chat and the calling systems and it will take about THREE HOURS (approx 03.30AM EST). The support center helpdesk is however accessible and please post a ticket from our helpdesk (  if you need any assistance.

We request your patience till the maintenance is completed.

UPDATE: Maintenance has been completed successfully

Hostdepartment Support team.


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Category : Financial Services Network Security

NetWatcher at FINRA Cybersecurity Conference

Financial Services Is A Top Targeted Industry By Cyber Criminals

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If you’re in the financial services industry, you should be aware that U.S. regulators require financial services companies to make cyber attacks public in their company filings.

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5 Cyber Threats Mid-sized Businesses Need to Protect Against

Despite the high risk, many mid-sized businesses are still unaware of the magnitude of cyber threats and fail to safeguard against vulnerabilities.

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The FTC holds you liable for a customer data breach…

If you don’t protect your company and customer’s data from a cyber-breach you will be open to an FTC lawsuit.

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Haiti: How to Help

If you are looking for places to donate a contribution to the relief effort, here are some links:

The Haitian League and Yele Haiti have direct connections on the island.

Partners in Health does a lot of good work in Haiti and around the world. Dr. Paul Farmer is one of the founders of the organization.

If you want to contribute to faith-based groups, you can donate to the American Jewish World Service Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, Jewish Federations of North America Haiti Relief Fund, Catholic Relief Services, and Medical Teams International.

For the secularists there is always Doctors Without Borders and the International Medical Corps.

Feel free to send suggestions and I will add them to the list. I figure most readers already know about the American Red Cross. I am particularly interested in providing links to Haitian groups.

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When baby rhesus macaques start to gain independence from their mothers, they don’t just do as baby birds do and jump out of the nest for good, never to return. They have this behavior we like to call a “check-in”. Basically, a baby will run around and explore its surroundings alone, then when he gets afraid or uncomfortable, he’ll scurry back to his mom just to let her know he’s OK and to make sure she’s still there.

As of September 21st, 2011, the popular website Four Square reached 1 billion “check-ins”. Four Square is a social networking site that allows its users to let others know where they are, as long as they connect with their smartphone or other GPS-enabled device.

Now, obviously, very few people are using Four Square to check in with their mothers (although you can create your own venue, so theoretically, assuming no one else has, you can make one and title it “My mom”. I’m not sure why there would already be a venue for your mom, though, that would be really creepy). But it got me wondering if there were any evolutionary reasons as to why 10 million people would already be so interested in such a website.

It is possible that this need to let others know where we are (and, conversely, know where everyone else is) actually did stem from non-human primates. We can theorize that, as the primates themselves changed, so did the behavior, from simply checking in with mom, to checking in with the whole world. Since the babies check in with mom because they feel insecure or alone, maybe that’s part of the reason we do it too—we want to let the world know we’re OK and make sure the rest of the world is still there to care.

We may have always had this inherent animalistic need to connect with others, but undeniably it is with technology such as Four Square that these traits can be truly expressed. On one hand, maybe the 10 million people who have already begun sharing their locations have a gene that makes them more apt to socialize. On the other, maybe we all have that gene and it just takes enough media saturation to bring it out of us. Or maybe I just don’t care about being the Mayor of TGIFriday’s because I could be doing something more productive, like being with real people (or checking my Facebook—same thing, right?).

One response

  1. I enjoyed reading your blog post! I recently wrote a paper for one of my classes about Facebook, and I also mentioned the check-in feature! I share a similar point of view as you because in my paper, I pointed out how everyone feels the need to tell everyone exactly when and where they are. I never heard of Four Square before, so this is interesting 🙂

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Thief (1981)

Sam Haine is simply a writer born on the East Coast who enjoys cooking. He is the contributor of the monthly Retro Movie Review and the recurring ‘Remember This…’

James Caan" Thief Movie Poster (1981)

James Caan" Thief Movie Poster (1981)

I know it’s late. It’s late in the month; it’s late in the evening and it’s time to tune into this month’s Retro Movie, Michael Mann’s THIEF 1981.

            Michael Mann’s directorial debut (also screenwriter, producer) about a career criminal, thief, safe cracker, set on the streets of Chicago.

            Frank (the thief) played by James Caan, in one of his best performances, lives life one score at a time. To the everyday world he’s just a used car salesman. He is single with no real companionship other than his accomplice played by James Belushi. He takes jobs when the money looks right. He cracks safes, bi-passes security and figures out the angles of entry for the big payoff.

           Frank is the hopeless dreamer you often find at the center of some neo-noirs. Ever since being released from prison his only goal is to never go back and by any means necessary fulfill some kind of stability. He keeps a makeshift collage of pictures in his wallet to remind himself of the things he wishes to have. Things that most of us take for granted, like a home, a family, a new beginning.

            James Caan has stated in some interviews that this is one of his favorite roles and the most difficult - "I like to be emotionally available but this guy is available to nothing." James Caan's emotional several-minute monologue with Weld in a coffee shop is often cited as the film's high point, and Caan has long considered the scene his favorite of his career.

            The film is also the film debut of former Chicago Police Officer and late actor Dennis Farina. Farina who later starred in 1986’s Manhunter and Mann’s short-lived TV series Crime Story, plays a henchmen to Robert Prosky’s  Leo chara

cter. Robert Prosky, who auditioned numerous times, delivers a cold-blooded portrayal of a hardened crime boss with the keys to the kingdom for a price. William Petersen makes a brief appearance as a night club bouncer.

            Roger Ebert described Thief as "one of the most intelligent thrillers I've seen" and gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, writing that the film's only major flaw was a failure to develop the subplot featuring Willie Nelson's character.

            The film is based on the 1975 novel The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar by "Frank Hohimer" (the pen name of real-life jewel thief John Seybold). As Hohimer, Seybold served as the technical advisor on the film's Chicago set, with FBI warrants outstanding.

            The films score was composed by Tangerine Dream and is the first of a long string of classic film scores from the group including Sorcerer, Risky Business, The Keep, Firestarter, Near Dark and Legend.

            The film is a must have for any fan of the neo-noir or crime film genre. The lighting and use of shadows and music would later be signature traits of Michael Mann’s future films. This is a must watch. A must watch.

            Normally I’d put a trigger warning or some type of disclaimer here reminding you that you are watching a great film from a time when films were great expressions of collaborative art. There will be harsh language in this film and depictions of violence because; it’s a film about criminals and what professional criminals actually do.

            Now take off your shoes and relax your feet and recline back into your lazy-chairs with the mug of hot milk that reads “Best Mom Ever” and press play. This month’s Retro Movie is THIEF(1981) directed by Michael Mann and starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Willie Nelson, James Belushi and Robert Prosky. Stay sharp, looks smart, keep it cool and always keep your finger on that Rewind Button.


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Skip to main content

Discover magazine on Oren Etzioni, Ali Farhadi, Allen Institute for AI

“Nestled among Seattle’s gleaming lights on a gloomy September day, a single nonprofit wants to change the world, one computer at a time. Its researchers hope to transform the way machines perceive the world: to have them not only see it, but understand what they’re seeing.

“At the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), researchers are working on just that. AI2, founded in 2014 by Microsoft visionary Paul Allen, is the nation’s largest nonprofit AI research institute. … At AI2, unshackled by profit-obsessed boardrooms, the mandate from CEO Oren Etzioni is simple: Confront the grandest challenges in artificial intelligence research and serve the common good …”

Read more here.

March 24, 2017


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Skip to main content Text-only Version

Students Have Many Indoor/Outdoor Collaboration Options

PHOTO: Wall word art in UF Newell Hall.

UF students have access to state-of-the-art technology and collaborative learning spaces 24/7.

The newly renovated Newell Hall features movable, tech-friendly furniture, with outlets on nearly every piece. Reitz Union also has more than 20 new conference rooms and study spaces that students can reserve at no charge. Need to create a video for a class or club project? Library West’s One Button Studio is easy to use and also free. Built by UFIT, the One Button Studio is equipped with state-of-the-art camera, lighting, audio, and green screen equipment. All that’s needed to record a video is a flash drive.

“UFIT regularly works with the UF’s Smathers Libraries and the Division of Student Affairs to get the technology students need to collaborate digitally and in person, in more and more places where students need it on campus,” said Mark McCallister, interim director of Academic Technology.

More options: Collaboration Commons, located in Marston Science Library’s (MSL) basement, features a visualization wall, 3-D printing and scanning, and super high-tech study rooms. Click here to see the technologies available and to reserve a room in MSL. For UF’s outdoorsy collaborators, Wi-Fi was also recently expanded in and around the North Lawn and the Plaza of the Americas.


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Stanford University News Service

CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558

New ethnic studies program approved

The Faculty Senate on Nov. 21 approved a new interdisciplinary program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) that is attracting national attention even before the first classes are taught.

Both Al Camarillo, professor of history and newly appointed dean of CSRE, and Ramón Saldívar, vice provost for undergraduate education, said they had been receiving telephone calls from administrators at other universities, asking for copies of the proposed CSRE legislation.

Camarillo told the senators that the impetus for the new program could be traced to the 1970s, when students first began asking for programs in ethnic studies.

Two years ago John Shoven, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, appointed two faculty committees to explore whether Stanford should offer degree programs in Chicano and Asian American studies. Earlier that year Chicana students had staged a four-day hunger strike in support of a Chicano studies program and Asian American students had disrupted a meeting of the Faculty Senate to call for establishment of an Asian American studies program.

Camarillo said he anticipates that the program might have between 50 and 100 majors within three years, and perhaps six times as many minors. The success of CSRE, he said, would be marked not only by the number of majors it attracts, but also by the commitment of faculty and the expansion of the core curriculum.

In 1989, Camarillo said, Stanford received a substantial grant from the James Irvine Foundation and with that money more than 40 new courses were either developed or revised for the new interdisciplinary program. As a result, students now will be able to enroll in almost 170 courses that are cross-listed in CSRE and other departments in winter quarter and can major in one of four areas: Asian American studies, comparative studies in race and ethnicity, Native American studies, and Chicano/a studies.

Camarillo added that in 1993 the School of Humanities and Sciences received a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to fund faculty seminars in comparative studies of race and ethnicity.

"A constellation of faculty was brought together for the first time, crossing disciplines, crossing regions, crossing national boundaries in the discussion of race and ethnicity," Camarillo said. This core of faculty, he said, would constitute the foundation of the new research initiatives.

Camarillo will coordinate the Chicano/a studies major in the 1996-97 academic year, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, will succeed him the following year. Other track coordinators are Gordon Chang, associate professor of history, for Asian American studies, and Teresa Lafromboise, associate professor of education, for Native American studies.

The dean's office has allocated two faculty billets for CSRE, to be allotted to social science departments. Carolyn Wong, the first faculty member hired by the political science department specifically to teach in the program, will arrive in winter quarter and is expected to begin teaching in spring quarter. A faculty search currently is under way in the anthropology department.

Camarillo said that a research institute for graduate students and faculty will be co-directed by George Fredrickson, professor of history, and Claude Steele, professor of psychology.

Shoven, who called the program a "very good start," predicted that CSRE minors would be "very popular." He also said that Stanford is considering hosting a national conference in 1999 or 2000 about the comparative study of race and ethnicity in the United States.

"This is a chance to be quite innovative at Stanford in the way we bring these new programs together," he said.

Saldívar said he hoped students who chose to major in CSRE would be "able to articulate sharply and clearly the historical arguments on the present [race and ethnic] situation" in the United States, and that the program would become a "model of comparative inquiry."

By Diane Manuel

© Stanford University. All Rights Reserved. Stanford, CA 94305. (650) 723-2300.


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seal  Purdue News

July 4, 2003

Willie Nelson coming to Elliott Hall of Music

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Country music legend Willie Nelson will perform at Elliott Hall of Music at 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 5, to kick off the 2003-04 Purdue Convocations season.

Willie Nelson

The show is co-sponsored by the Purdue Student Concert Committee.

Nelson, a Luck, Texas, native, recently turned 70. Known best for his long hair, blue jeans, bandana and overall hard rock look, he has crossed over generations of music lovers and genres to be considered one of the most versatile musicians of our time.

In touch with his roots and knowing that his fame could be used to help others, Nelson, along with Neil Young and John Mellencamp, founded the Farm Aid concert series, which has raised more than $12 million in the last decade.

Tickets for Nelson's Purdue concert are $32.50, which includes a $1 facilities fee. Campus sales starts at 10 a.m. Friday, July 11, at campus box offices. Students, faculty and staff must bring their Purdue ID to purchase tickets on Friday. Purchasers may not bring someone else's ID to purchase tickets.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, July 14, at Purdue box offices and all Ticketmaster outlets. Box office phone numbers are (765) 494-3933 or 1-800-914-SHOW.

Source: Laura Clavio, Purdue Convocations assistant director, (765) 496-2913

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096;

* To the Purdue News and Photos Page


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WM Prompt 34.7. Mun Prompt: Which aspects of your muse are the most difficult to find?

I think one of the hardest things for me to do with Fanny is to write her in the third person. She has such a dominant and clear voice and has for so many years, that to tell very many of her stories in anything but first person sounds absolutely unnatural for her. For specific things, she has aloowed me to post for her in the third person. She sort of prefers that I not do that too often.

Also, for the longest time, I could not really write about any sort of intimate details between she and her husband. It was very odd, because it was the same way for the mun of all_forme, as well. We both can write erotica, but for whatever reason, these two, up until last summer, absolutely would not give us those details. I think it fits for his being very French, and very proper, and she tends to have the same sorts of attitude toward those sorts of things. Fanny will give you something when she is damned good and ready to give it to you, and not one bloody moment before. I have had people say to me, “Well, she is your character afterall. Can’t you you force her to do what you want?” I have to laugh at that because Fanny is not “my” character / muse”. She is based off of one of my ancestors and I am her scribe, but she is very much her own person with her own distinctive voice. Forcing her to do anything would be like trying to quite literally force a mule through the eye of a needle. It won’t happen. I can’t force her to play with anyone she doesn’t want to, either. I have had specific requests from other writers and muns only to have her write or roleplay with them, and when she turns up her nose and walks away, that’s it. Conversely, when she decides she sees something in another muse, and she is interested , Hell hath no fury, irresistible force or immoveable object that could possibly stand in her way. And she could like that person or muse for any reason she deems appropriate. I have little or no say in the matter whatsoever. To her I am the employee. I am along for the ride, so I need to simply shut up and drive to the destination that she gives me. And yes, I am very thankful she lets me drive at all, because under the dictionary definition of ‘control freak’, somewhere there must be a picture of my muse!

Fanny / Faelyn has a very specific way of doing things. She has particular tastes, personality quirks, preferences and inclinations. There are those who have either tried to write her into stories, thinking that they know what her voice is, when they really don’t understand her at all. A few prime examples are these. She won’t use contractions in sentences when she is writing. Fanny will also uses UK English specifically. I have had other writers that I partner with who give her dialogue in her posts and it is completely wrong for those two reasons mostly. Fanny is rarely silly, she is extremely formal and she tends to conduct herself as a diplomat. She is not a muse that gets angry over jealousy. She does not compete with other women. She honestly and truly believes that she does not need to. Putting her in a situation where she is required to be jealous or to “lose it” is very, very difficult. Loss of control is a breach of one of the Laws of Power that she has committed to memory. When you lose control, you quite simply in Fanny’s view, give away your Power (always spelled with a capital ‘P’), and she is NOT about to do that without a substantial bit of resistance.

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One response to “WM Prompt 34.7. Mun Prompt: Which aspects of your muse are the most difficult to find?

  1. I understand what you mean about her having specific ways of ‘speaking’. She has a very distinct voice that makes her instantly recognizable when I read anything she does.

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Sunset Valley Photowalk … tomorrow!

By | 2016-12-18T17:01:17+00:00 September 17th, 2010|0 Comments

Canon 60D, Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens, 1/80 sec at f/2.5, ISO 100
(Grainy B&W effect applied in-camera)

Tomorrow evening is the Photowalking Utah “Sunset Valley Photowalk“. Be sure to bring a camera, tripod and also an SD card if you’d like to try out one of the Olympus E-PL1 “Live Drive” camera kits provided by Pictureline (as seen in the image above). More details are over at the Photowalking Utah website and also in the Flickr group.

Hope to see you there!

About the Author:

My name is Nicole and I’m a photographer, author, & educator living in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. When I’m not making photos I’m writing books and tutorials for my online store, Learn more about me and my story here.

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31 May 2006

ACL papers up

Available here. Some that look especially interesting:

  • A Discriminative Global Training Algorithm for Statistical MT (Tillmann and Zhang)
  • Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields for Improved Sequence Segmentation and Labeling (Jiao, Wang, Lee, Greiner and Schuurmans)
  • An Iterative Implicit Feedback Approach to Personalized Search (Lv, Sun, Zhang, Nie, Chen and Zhang)
  • Training Conditional Random Fields with Multivariate Evaluation Measures (Suzuki, McDermott and Isozaki)
  • Integrating Syntactic Priming into an Incremental Probabilistic Parser, with an Application to Psycholinguistic Modeling (Dubey, Keller and Sturt)
  • Robust PCFG-Based Generation using Automatically Acquired LFG Approximations (Cahill and van Genabith)
  • Exploiting Syntactic Patterns as Clues in Zero-Anaphora Resolution (Iida)
  • An End-to-End Discriminative Approach to Machine Translation (Liang, Bouchard-Cote, Taskar and Klein)

26 May 2006

Here's a Loss, There's a Loss

There are several different notions of "loss" that one encounters in machine learning literature. The definition I stick with is: the end criteria on which we will be evaluated. (The other notions often have to deal with how one approximates this loss for learning: for instance the standard loss for classification is 0/1, but this is approximated by hinge-loss or log-loss or...) For a large number of problems, there are quite a few "reasonable" losses. For chunking problems, there is 0/1 loss (did you get everything correct), Hamming loss (how many individual predictions did you get correct) and F-score (over chunks). For MT, there is WER, PER, HED, NIST, BLEU, etc. For summarization there are all the Rouges.

Some of these losses are easier to optimize than others (optimize from the learning perspective). The question that arises is: if I can optimize one, should I worry about any of the others? A positive answer would make our lives much easier, because we could ignore some of the complexities. A negative answer would mean that we, as machine learning people, would have to keep "chasing" the people inventing the loss functions.

It seems the answer is "yes and no." Or, more specifically, if the problem is sufficiently easy, then the answer is no. In all other cases, the answer is yes.

Arguments in favor of "no":

  • All automatically evaluated loss functions are by definition approximations to the true loss. What does one more step of approximation hurt?
  • The loss functions are rarely that different: I can often closely approximate loss B with a weighted version of loss A (and weighting is much easier than changing the loss entirely).
  • Empirical evidence in sequence labeling/chunking problems and parsing show that optimizing 0/1 or Hamming or accuracy or F-score can all do very well.
Arguments in favor of "yes":
  • If not "yes" then reranking would not be such a popular technique (though it has other advantages in features).
  • Empirical evidence in MT and summarization suggest that optimizing different different measures produces markedly different results (though how this translates into human evaluation is questionable).
  • If effort is put in to finding an automatic criteria that closely correlates with human judgment, we should take advantage of it if we want to do well on human judgements.
There is a fourth argument for "yes" which comes from the binary classification literature. If we solve hundreds of different classification problems, some of which are harder than others, we can compare directly how well one loss looks like another. The standard picture looks like that below:

On the x-axis is one loss function (say, hinge-loss) and on the y-axis is another (say, squared loss). Each dot corresponds to a different learning problem: those in the bottom left are easy, those in the top right are hard. What we commonly observe is that for very easy problems, it doesn't matter what loss you use (getting low error on one directly implies low error on another). However, as the problem gets harder, it makes a bigger and bigger difference which we use.

A confounding factor which even further argues for "yes" is that in the binary classification example, the losses used are ones for which zero loss in one always implies zero loss for the other. This is very much not the case for the sorts of losses we encounter in NLP.

So, my personal belief is that if we can optimize the more complicated loss, we always should, unless the problem is so easy that it is unlikely to matter (eg, part of speech tagging). But for any sufficiently hard problem, it is likely to make a big difference. Though I would love to see some results that do the same experiment that Franz did in his MT paper, but also with human evaluations.

23 May 2006

Penn Discourse TreeBank

I visited Penn last November and while talking with Joshi, I found out about a recent annotation effort from Penn/LDC: the Penn Discourse Treebank. (There is also an upcoming tutorial at ACL about the effort). The PDTB is quite different from discourse resources I'm familiar with (eg., the RST treebank). The interesting aspect of the PDTB is that discourse connectives (either those that appear explicitly or those that are implicit) are treated as a sort of predicate between two arguments, much like one would expect for verbs.

As someone who is interested in problems that break the sentence boundary, I find much discourse-related resources and work interesting. One nice thing about the PDTB is that, since not every sentence is required to relate to another (relation only occurs when it is clear), human agreement is high and many unnatural decisions made in the RST treebank are avoided (eg., forcing things to be a tree when they shouldn't be). One not-so-nice thing about the PDTB is that not every sentence is required to relate to another. In a theory of discourse, I am looking for something that tells me why this blog post is a text and why a string of largely unrelated sentences are not. The PDTB-style annotation does not give us this. Because of this, it is hard for me to imagine many applications for which this is incredibly useful.

In case anyone more familiar with the PDTB group reads this blog, I'm curious if anyone has proposed baseline models and evaluation criteria for this problem. I have some ideas if there isn't anything out there, but I don't want to step on toes...

21 May 2006

Getting Started In: Summarization

I'll kick off the "Getting Started In" series with summarization, since it is near and dear to my heart.

Warning: I should point out at the get-go that these posts are not intended to be comprehensive or present a representative sample of work in an area. These are blog posts, not survey papers, tutorials or anything of that sort. If I don't cite a paper, it's not because I don't think it's any good. It's also probably not a good idea to base a career move on what I say.

Summarization is the task of taking a long utterance (or a collection of long utterances) and producing a short utterance. The most common is when utterance=document, but there has also been work on speech summarization too. There are roughly three popular types of summarization: headline generation, sentence extraction and sentence compression (or document compression). In sentence extraction, a summary is created by selecting a bunch of sentences from the original document(s) and gluing them together. In headline generation, a very short summary (10 words or so) is created by selecting a bunch of words from the original document(s) and gluing them together. In sentence (document) compression a summary is created by dropping words and phrases from a sentence (document).

One of the big problems in summarization is that if you give two humans the same set of documents and ask them to write a summary, they will do wildly different things. This happens because (a) its unclear what information is important and (b) each human has different background knowledge. This is partially alleviated by moving to a task-specific setting, like the query-focused summarization model, which has grown increasingly popular in the past few years. In the query-focused setting, a document (or document collection) is provided along with a user query that serves to focus the summary on a particular topic. This doesn't fix problem (b), but goes a long way to fixing (a), and human agreement goes up dramatically. Another advantage to the query-focused setting is that, at least with news documents, the most important information is usually presented first (this is actually stipulated by many newspaper editor's guidelines). This means that producing a summary by just taking leading sentences often does incredibly well.

A related problem is that of evaluation. The best option is to do a human evaluation, preferably in some simulated real world setting. A reasonable alternative is to ask humans to write reference summaries and compare system output to these. The collection of Rouge metrics has been designed to automate this comparison (Rouge is essentially a collection of similarity metrics for matching human to system summaries). Overall, however, evaluation is a long-standing and not-well-solved problem in summarization.

Techniques for summarization vary by summary type (extraction, headline, compression).

The standard recipe for sentence extraction works as follows. A summary is created by first extracting the "best" sentence according to a scoring module. The second sentence is selected by finding the next-best sentence according to the scoring module, minus some redundancy penalty (we don't want to extract the same information over and over again). This process ends when the summary is sufficiently long. The scoring component assigns to each sentence in the original document collection a score that says how important it is (in query-focused summarization, for instance, the word overlap between the sentence and the query would be a start). The redundancy component typically computes the similarity between a sentence and the previously extracted sentences.

Headline generation and sentence compression have not yet reached a point of stability in the same way that sentence extraction has. A very popular and successful approach to headline generation is to train a hidden Markov model something like what you find in statistical machine translation (similar to IBM model 1, for those familiar with it). For sentence compression, one typically parses a sentence and then attempts to summarize it by dropping words and phrases (phrases = whole constituents).

Summarization has close ties to question answering and information retrieval; in fact, having some limited background in standard IR techniques (tf-idf, vector space model, etc.) are pretty much necessary in order to understand what goes on in summarization.

Here are some papers/tutorials/slides worth reading to get one started (I'd also recommend Inderjeet Mani's book, Automatic Summarization if you don't mind spending a little money):

  1. Background IR material
  2. Sentence extraction
    1. Marcu's ACL tutorial
    2. Multi-Document Summarization By Sentence Extraction
    3. Automated Multi-document Summarization in NeATS
    4. A Trainable Document Summarizer
  3. Headline generation: Automatic Headline Generation for Newspaper Stories
  4. Sentence compression: Statistics-Based Summarization --- Step One: Sentence Compression
  5. Other:
    1. Discussion: What might be in a summary?
    2. Automatic evaluation: ROUGE: a Package for Automatic Evaluation of Summaries
    3. Recent fun stuff: Cut and paste based text summarization, Learning to Paraphrase: An Unsupervised Approach Using Multiple-Sequence Alignment and A Statistical Approach for Automatic Speech Summarization

16 May 2006

Structured Prediction versus Multitask Learning

For a formal comparison, I will briefly define both SP and MTL:

A structured prediction problem is a distribution D over pairs (x,y), with x in X and y in Y, together with a loss function l(y,y'). Typically Y is large, and elements y have complex interdependent structured, which can be interpreted in various ways. The goal is a function f : X -> Y that minimizes the expect loss: E_{x,y ~ D}[l(y,f(x))].

A multitask learning problem is a distribution D over tuples (x,y,y1,...,yK), with x in X and (for simplicity) y,y1,...,yK all in 2={0,1}. The goal is a function f : X -> 2 that minimizes the expected loss: E_{x,y,y1,...,yK ~ D}[1(y != f(x))]. Importantly the loss doesn't care about y1...yK. However, we typically assume that y1...yK are related to the x -> y mapping.

Without assumptions on the SP loss or output space Y, SP subsumes MTL. For instance, in sequence labeling, we can think of a multitask learning problem as a sequence labeling problem where we only care about the label of the first word. This reminds me of some results that suggest that it's really not any easier to predict the first word in a translation than to solve the entire translation problem. This means that we could try to solve an MTL problem by applying, say, a CRF.

One key difference that seems quite important is that results from MTL have suggested that it is easy to get an MTL model that performs better on the first task, but its hard to get a single MTL model that performs well on all tasks simultaneously. For instance, in neural networks, one might want to run 1000 training epochs to do well on task 1, but only 10 or as many as 10000 to do well on one of the other tasks. This implies that it's probably not a good idea to naively apply something like a CRF to an MTL problem. For this reason (and the nature of the loss functions), I feel that SP and MTL are complementary problems.

The application of MTL to time-series data has been reportedly very successful. Time-series data is nice because it naturally provides additional tasks: in addition to predicting the value at time t, also predict at times t+5, t+10 and t+20. During training we have access to these values, but we don't during testing, so we don't have the option of using them as features.

One especially cool thing about this observation is that it applies directly to search-based structured prediction! That is, when attempting to make a prediction about some search step, we can consider future search steps to be related tasks and apply MTL techniques. For instance, when trying to predict the first word in a translation, we use the second and third words as related tasks. I, personally, think this would be quite a cool research project.

So my tentative conclusions are: (1) SP can solve MTL, but this is probably not a good idea. (2) MTL can be applied to search-based SP and this probably is a good idea. (3) SP and MTL should not be considered the same problem: the primary difference is the loss function, which is all important to SP, but not so important to MTL. That said, SP algorithms probably do get a bit of gain from the "good internal representation" learned in an MTL setting, but by trying to learn this representation directly, we could probably do much better.

14 May 2006

NLP is an Engineering Discipline?

At my graduation ceremony this past week, Dean Yannis Yortsos gave a short speech, in which he quoted someone famous (I've already forgotten who it was) at the Engineering graduation segment, saying something akin to "Science is the study of what the world is; Engineering is making something the world has never seen before." This comment had a fairly significant effect on me. However, when thinking about it in the context of NLP, it seems that NLP is an Engineering discipline, not a scientific one, at least according to the above (implied) definition of the terms.

NLP lives somewhere within the realm of language, statistics, machine learning, and cognitive science (you can include signal processing if you want to account for speech). Let's suppose that NLP is a scientific discipline: then, what aspect of the world does it study? It cannot be language, otherwise we'd be linguists. It cannot be statistics or learning, lest we call ourselves mathematicians. Cognitive science is out or we'd be...well, cognitive scientists. In fact, at least as I've described it in my job talks, NLP is the field that deals with building systems to solve problems that have a language component. This seems to render NLP to fall exclusively within the realm of Engineering.

This observation seems to have several repurcussions. It means, among other things, that we should not attempt to seek theoretical results, unless we are wearing another hat (I often wear the hat of a machine learning person; other people play linguists occasionally). It also means that perhaps we shouldn't complain as much that so much of NLP is system building. It seems that almost by definition, NLP must be system building: we are out to create things that never existed before.

If one, like me, is interested in science---that is, the study of natural things in the world---it also means that we had better find some related topic (machine learning, cognitive science or linguistics) to study simultaneously.

11 May 2006

ICML Accepted Papers Up

See here. I'm excited to see:

  • Bayesian Multi-Population Haplotype Inference (Xing, Sohn, Jordan + Teh)
  • Constructing Informative Priors using Transfer Learning (Raina, Ng + Koller)
  • Disciminative Unsupervised Learning of Structured Predictors (Xu, Wilkinson, Southey + Schuurmans)
  • Maximum Margin Planning (Ratliff, Bagnell + Zinkevich)
  • Pachinko Allocation (Li + McCallum)
  • Semi-supervised Learning for Structured Output Variables (Brefeld + Scheffer)
  • Topic Modeling: Beyond Bag-of-Words (Wallach)

08 May 2006

Making Humans Agree

The question of human agreement came up recently. As background, the common state of affairs in NLP when someone has decided to work on a new problem is to ask two (or more) humans to solve the problem and then find some way to measure the inter-annotator agreement. The idea is that if humans can't agree on a task, then it is not worth persuing a computational solution. Typically this is an iterative process. First some guidelines are written, then some annotation is done, then more guidelines are written, etc. The hope is that this process converges after a small number of iterations. LDC has made a science out of this. At the very least, inter-annotator agreement serves as a useful upper bound on system performance (in theory a system could do better; in practice, it does not).

There are two stances one can take on the annotator agreement problem, which are diametrically opposed. I will attempt to argue for both.

The first stance is: If humans do not agree, the problem is not worth working on. (I originally wrote "solving" instead of "working on," but I think the weakened form is more appropriate.) The claim here is that if a problem is so ill-specified that two humans perform it so differently, then when a system does it, we will have no way of knowing if it is doing a good job. If it mimics one of the humans, that's probably okay. But if it does something else, we have no idea if human N+1 might also do this, so we don't know if its good or bad. Moreover, it will be very difficult to learn, since the target concept is annotator-specific. We want to learn general rules, not rules specific to annotators.

The second stance is: If humans do agree, the problem is not worth working on. This is the more controversial statement: I have never heard anyone else ever make it. The argument here is that any problem that humans agree on is either uninteresting or has gone through so many iterations of definitions and redefinitions as to render it uninteresting. In this case, the annotation guidelines are essentially an algorithm that the annotator is executing. Making a machine execute a similar algorithm is not interesting because what it is mimicing is not a natural process, but something created by the designers. Even without multiple iterations of guidelines, high human agreement implies that the task being solved is too artificial: personalization is simply too important of an issue when it comes to language problems.

My beliefs are somewhere in the middle. If humans cannot agree at all, perhaps the problem is too hard. But if they agree too much, or if the guidelines are overly strict, then the problem may have been sapped of its reality. One should also keep in mind that personalization issues can render agreement low; we see this all the time in summarization. I do not think this necessarily means that task should not be worked on: it just means if worked on, it should be a personalized task. Measuring agreement in such cases is something I know nothing about.

05 May 2006

Search-based Structured Prediction

I normally would not make a post such as this one (my blog is not my advertisementsphere), but given that it is unlikely this paper will appear in a conference in the near future (and conferences are just ads), I decided to include a link. John, Daniel and I have been working on an algorithm called Searn for solving structured prediction problems. I believe that it will be useful to NLP people, so I hope this post deserves the small space it takes up.

03 May 2006

Supervised Hidden Variable Models

Hidden variable models have been extremely successful in unsupervised NLP problems, such as the famous alignment models for machine translation. Recently, two parsing papers and a textual entailment paper have applied hidden variable techniques to supervised problems. I find this approach appealing because it allows one to learn hidden variable models that are (hopefully) optimal for the end goal. This contrasts with, or example, unsupervised word alignment, where it is unclear if the same alignment is good for two different tasks, for instance translation or projection.

The question that interests me is "what exactly are hidden variables in these models?" As a simple example, let's take the following problem: we have an English sentence and an Arabic sentence and we want to know if they're aligned. Dragos has a paper that shows that we can do a good job of making this determination if we do the following: construct an alignment (using, eg., GIZA++) and then compute features over the alignment (length of aligned subphrases, number of unaligned words, etc.). One can imagine similar models for textual entailment, paraphrase identification, etc.

I would ideally like to learn the alignments as part of training the classifier, treating them essentially as hidden variables in the supervised problem.

So what happens in such a model? We learn to produce alignments and then define features over the alignments. From an information theoretic perspective, we needn't bother with the alignments: we can just define features on the original sentence pair. Perhaps these features will be somewhat unnatural, but I don't think so. To build the alignments, we'll have features like "the word 'man' is aligned to the word 'XXX'" (where 'XXX' is Arabic for 'man'). Then on top of this we'd have features that count how many words are successfully aligned. It's somewhat unclear if this is much more than just including all word pair features for a pure classification technique.

The key difference appears to be in the fact that we impose a strong constraint on the alignments. For instance, that they are one-to-one or one-to-many or something similar. This significantly reduces the number of features that are fed into the classifier.

At the same time, the hidden variable models look a lot like introducing a hidden layer into a neural network! Consider a drastic simplification of the parallel sentence detection problem (which is, in the end, just a binary classification problem). Namely, consider the XOR problem. As we all know, we can't solve this with a linear classifier. But if we add a hidden variable to the mix, we can easily find a solution (eg., the hidden variable indicates left-versus-right and then conditional on this, we learn two separate classifiers, one pointing up and one pointing down). This is exactly what a two layer neural net (i.e., one hidden layer) would do!

From this perspective, it seems one can argue that hidden variable models are simply increasing the model complexity of the underlying learner. This comes at a cost: increased model complexity means we either need more data or stronger prior information. Hidden variable models --- more precisely, the constraints present in hidden variable models --- seem to provide this prior information.

01 May 2006

Getting Started in NLP

Since starting the blog, a few people have asked me how one can get started in NLP, while residing in a department lacking NLP researchers. This is a difficult question: I fell into NLP quite naturally when I was at CMU and made an easy transition to grad school at USC, both of which have awesome NLP groups. Lacking such internal support, one has to be much more ambitious to get to the point where one could do real research in the field. The obvious avenues for support are: reading books (which ones?) and papers (from where and by whom?), going to nearby conferences (which ones?) and experimentation (on what?). (New option: read and post to this blog!)

The four standard books in the field are Statistical NLP (Manning + Schutze), Speech and Language Processing (Jurafsky + Martin), Statistical Language Learning (Charniak) and Natural Language Understanding (Allen). The latter two are much older, though some people prefer Charniak to Manning + Schutze. I would probably pick up Manning + Schutze if I could only buy one. From this book, I think that skimming Chapters 1, 4, 6 and 13 should give a reasonable (but not uniformly sampled) representation of background knowledge everyone should know. Unfortunately, this misses many topics: information extraction, summarization, question answering, dialog systems, discourse, morphology, ontologies, pragmatics, semantics, sentiment analysis and textual entailment.

Finding good papers for beginners is hard. Without guidance, skimming titles and abstracts of papers published in ACL, NAACL, HLT or COLING since 2002 or 2003 should enable someone to find out what looks interesting to them. I know many advisors take this approach with new students. The ACL anthology is great for finding old papers. I'll probably post at a later date about what are the "must reads" for the areas I know best. Once you've found a few papers you like, I'd check out the respective author's web pages and see if they have any related work (best bet is probably to look at the advisor's page: often s/he will have multiple students working on similar topics). Also, advisor's often have course material and slides from tutorials: these are great places to get introductory-level material.

If you happen to get lucky (I never have) and one of the above conferences is located nearby, I'd just go. Presentations of papers (if they're good) are often better from the perspective of getting the high-level overview than the papers themselves, since papers have to be technically complete.

I'm perhaps overcommitting myself, given my promise to talk more about structured prediction, but over the next few weeks/months, I'll work on a "Getting Starting in X" series. X will likely range over the set { summarization, sequence labeling, information extraction, machine translation, language modeling }. Requests for other topics will be heard, keeping in mind I'm not an expert in many areas.


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Emmanuel’s Dream

Emmanuel’s Dream

written by Laurie Ann Thompson; illustrated by Sean Qualls

2015 (Schwartz and Wade Books)

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher

Emmanuel was born with only one strong leg. His father left, but his mother stayed strong. Mama Comfort pushed Emmanuel to be independent.  When he became too heavy for his mother to carry him, Emmanuel hopped to school on one leg two miles each way every day. Is it possible to be uplifted and have your heart break at the same time? I wondered that as I read that page. Emmanuel continued pushing forward. Unfortunately, perhaps his biggest obstacle came when Mama Comfort was so sick that she could not work any longer. Emmanuel, at age 13, left his mother and siblings to find work in the city of Accra which was 150 miles away. He eventually found work and was sending money home when word came that Mama Comfort was dying. As he was by her bedside, she told Emmanuel, “Be respectful, take care of your family, don’t ever beg. And don’t ever give up.” The next morning, Christmas Day, she passed away. Emmanuel used this tragedy to spur his dream. He procured a bike and other equipment from an American foundation. He rode his bicycle nearly 400 miles around his home country of Ghana. During this journey, he spread his message of respect for people with disabilities.

Unbelievable! This guy could have given up several times during his life but he just kept pushing and pushing. Emmanuel is inspiring. He spurs you to want to take action. Emmanuel’s Dream will be perfect for our wax museum biography project. I can already see a student with a bike and a tri-fold board talking to visitors. This book is also great for teaching character and about character traits. Who would be better for talking about determination? I would definitely recommend Emmanuel’s Dream to school counselors and classroom teachers.

Here is the link to the curriculum guide for Emmanuel’s Dream:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/251881365/Emmanuel-s-Dream-Curriculum-Guide#scribd

Check out more stuff at NC Teacher Stuff: http://ncteacherstuff.blogspot.com


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RSS Feed

Review – Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted

With the voices of Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, Jada Pinkett Smith, Sacha Baron Cohen. Written by Eric Darnell and Noah Baumbach. Directed by Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath, Conrad Vernon. Rated PG (for some mild action and rude humor). 93 minutes.

DreamWorks Animation plays number two to Pixar in terms of American animation, and Pixar’s “Brave” seems to be one of the most anticipated films of the summer. Yet DreamWorks Animation is head-and-shoulders among the rest of the competition, even if they allowed their “Shrek” franchise to burn itself out. That is not the case with the “Madagascar” films, which have been underrated and yet consistently work both as character-driven stories and as zany comedies. MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE’S MOST WANTED is a lot of fun, and a whole lot better than Pixar’s last offering, the abysmal “Cars 2.”

For those coming in late, the series is about four animals from the Central Park Zoo who escape and find themselves in Madagascar. Alex the lion (voice of Ben Stiller) is the leader of the gang, which includes Marty the feisty zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the neurotic giraffe (David Schwimmer), and Gloria the lovable hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith). Along with assorted monkeys, penguins, and King Julien XIII (Sacha Baron Cohen) – the high-stepping king of the lemurs – they are still trying to find their way back the U.S.

When our heroes discover that the shifty penguins have taken off to Monte Carlo without them, they decide to get there on their own as part of a plan to work their way back to New York. It is in Monte Carlo that they meet their new nemesis, Captain Chantel DuBois (Frances McDormand), who is in charge of animal control and seems to be part animal herself. After a riotous chase that – in the best cartoon tradition – repeals the laws of physics, Alex and company find themselves buying a broken-down circus as a cover. The plan is that the circus, along with its new attractions, will lead to an American promoter bringing them to the States.

You can try to guess where the story goes from here, but the plot is the least of it. It’s really about the characters and the gags, from Alex’s explanation of an American trapeze act (it includes jet packs) to King Julien stealing off with his new lady love – a bear – to visit the Vatican. There are also several new characters, besides the hilariously obsessive Captain DuBois, such as the embittered tiger Vitaly (Bryan Cranston) who gets to deliver the film’s most unexpected (and perfectly clean) expletive.

In short, “Madagascar 3” has plenty of slapstick and adventure for the kids, as well as a lot of wit and charm for the adults. As the gags play out to their climactic showdown, this seems a fitting end to the series. It’s not “Toy Story 3,” but it is suitable conclusion to the story and one that should leave everyone but the most cynical viewers with big smiles.•••

North Shore Movies has given this film a score of 3 out of 5.Daniel M. Kimmel is a veteran movie critic and author of a host of film-related books, the most recent being Jar Jar Binks Must Die… And Other Observations About Science Fiction Movies. He teaches film at Suffolk University and lives in Somerville.

About Daniel M. Kimmel

Film critic, author, lecturer.

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Thursday, June 07, 2012

Godspeed Ray

Godspeed Ray

and thanks to Scott for making this unique moment happen.

Credit: NASA (SDO/Goddard, JPL)

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Kevembuangga said...

Huh? In the *second* view Venus is slightly transparent, WTF?

Igor said...

This is interesting but the WTF was not realy warranted.

The third filter also has this property. Right now I am thinking the atmosphere of venus does this ( something we are lilely not going to see with the mercury transit in 2016)


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Friday, May 17, 2013

Ghost Imaging does 3D and multispectral Imaging

Sylvain Gigan (also in Science) let me know of the following paper that is also making the rounds in Science. If you recall, it was shown earlier that compressive sensing was speeding up the process of acquiring the data. The physics itself is not changed and revolves around this formula:

3D Computational Ghost Imaging by Baoqing Sun, Matthew P. Edgar, Richard Bowman, Liberty E. Vittert,Stephen S. Welsh, Ardrian Bowman, Miles J. Padgett
Computational ghost imaging retrieves the spatial information of a scene using a single pixel detector. By projecting a series of known random patterns and measuring the back reflected intensity for each one, it is possible to reconstruct a 2D image of the scene. In this work we overcome previous limitations of computational ghost imaging and capture the 3D spatial form of an object by using several single pixel detectors in different locations. From each detector we derive a 2D image of the object that appears to be illuminated from a different direction, using only a single digital projector as illumination. Comparing the shading of the images allows the surface gradient and hence the 3D form of the object to be reconstructed. We compare our result to that obtained from a stereo- photogrammetric system utilizing multiple high resolution cameras. Our low cost approach is compatible with consumer applications and can readily be extended to non-visible wavebands.
The 3D of this paper has little to do with the 2D extraction from Three-dimensional ghost imaging ladar and we measure reflectance difference here as opposed to time of flight information. Here is the multispectral paper:

Multi-wavelength compressive computational ghost imaging by Stephen S. Welsh, Matthew P. Edgar, Phillip Jonathan, Baoqing Sun, Miles. J. Padgett
The field of ghost imaging encompasses systems which can retrieve the spatial information of an object through correlated measurements of a projected light eld, having spatial resolution, and the associated reflected or transmitted light intensity measured by a photodetector. By employing a digital light projector in a computational ghost imaging system with multiple spectrally fi ltered photodetectors we obtain high-quality multi-wavelength reconstructions of real macroscopic objects. We compare di erent reconstruction algorithms and reveal the use of compressive sensing techniques for achieving sub-Nyquist performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of this technology in non-visible and fluorescence imaging applications.

Thanks Sylvain !

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