Last night’s Plenary talk at the HCSNet SummerFest was given by Justine Cassell. She was an extremely good speaker and is doing some really interesting research.
One choice quote (on the subject of doing human-interaction experiments with extroverted and introverted subjects):
There was an interesting artifact of doing the study at MIT: We had to go outside MIT to find extroverted subjects.
Is it just me, or do these ads have a certain… non-native-speaker kind of feel to them?
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Both from Greenwood Plaza.
(cf. engrish.com)
Nice going, Australia:
I had no idea the Kyoto protocol was so widely ratified.
Of course, the government has decided to spin the protocol as outdated and something which needs to be ‘moved beyond’ (by which they presumably mean ‘ignored’).
But the federal Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, says Australia is focused on measures that should be taken after Kyoto expires in 2012. (ABC)
Early this year I happened to be sitting in the gallery of the house of reps on the day Australia was required to say whether it would ratify the Kyoto protocol. Howard and most of the government got up and walked out after question time, and Beazley stood and gave a long and rather impassioned speech about how important the protocol is. It seems like one of those issues where everyone can see it coming, slowly but inevitably. And there’s going to be lots of apologising after it’s far too late, but the incumbents here and in the US basically seem to have decided it’s a better bet politically or economically to pretend the issue doesn’t exist.
Since it’s pretty cool-looking, I thought I’d share a screenshot of what I’ve been doing at work today:
The system (Steve’s) differentiates speech from background noise. This is a trivial test in a quietish room with one speaker (me) saying the same thing over and over again.
The top purple line is the system’s guess at where the speech is, with the bottom purple line being the real location of speech. The red and blue lines represent “likelihood that it’s speech” and “likelihood that it’s silence” – when the blue line is higher than the red for a significant time, the area is marked as speech.