Passive Solar

I was on the solar car team back in undergrad, so I have a special place in my heart for solar panels. (I should really share some stories about that sometime, it was quite an amazing part of my life). BTW, funny story - when I was growing up in Phoenix, the HOAs would not allow people to install solar panels because they were unsightly. So I have another special place on the other side of my heart for HOAs.

Anyway, the more I've been reading about other uses of solar, the more amazed I am.

1. This article from Mother Earth News talks about how to build your own solar 'collector'. You add another 'wall' to your south-facing wall, creating a small air gap with vents at the top and bottom and a heat-absorbing material inside. The air heats up and creates a current, blowing hot air out of the top and sucking colder air in at the bottom.

2. Or you can use hot asphalt to collect energy? Coming from Arizona, where you can cook eggs on the sidewalk, I must say this idea sounds like it has a lot of potential!

Here's the coolest thing that I just read this morning...

3. Just putting water in the sun can (mostly) purify it! This slideshow from a Kenya slum has some amazing information about how they are using sewage as fuel/fertilizer, and the sun to purify water. What an amazing piece of survival knowledge!! (Could be very useful if society breaks down after peak oil...)

4. Also I hear the sun is instrumental for growing food... ;)

Countdown to Thesis (3)

Today I reached a big milestone! I completed my first experiment. What is this experiment, you ask? Well... I am taking a bunch of utterances from the Communicator corpus (which I'm way overdue to write a rant about) and trying to classify them as "neutral" or "frustrated". The Communicator corpus consists of people trying to make a flight reservation with an automated system. So one utterance might be "I'd like to fly to Boston", "April 21st", "no", "start over", etc.

My results from experiment 1 are.... 58.5% accurate! Yay! :) Notice the giant improvement over random chance, which would be 50% accurate.

You might think that it's hard to find humor in such an experiment, and you would be right, for the most part. But there's one thing which I will explain here which makes me chuckle when I run my experiments. Because I am doing cross-validation (breaking my data up into 10 subsets) and bagging (creating 20 trees for each data set), I have 200 trees to keep track of for each experiment. So I came up with a sweet naming convention for them:

emotion1_d5.tree <--- here the "1" is for the 1st cross-validation set, and the "5" is for the 5th tree to be used for bagging.

So inside my scripts, I set up the names like this:

emotion$subset_d$bag.tree

d$bag..... get it?! It's funny. D-bag. As in, "Some people may say that Ryan Seacrest is a d-bag."

Yes, my life really is that sad. Don't you feel good now?

Peak Fatalities

I read an interesting article yesterday about how there has recently been a very sharp decline in the number of fatalities from car accidents. At least as you're filling up, you can think about all the lives that are being saved.

According to the article, peak fatalities happened in 1972, at 55,600 that year. Last year it was just over 41,000 which still seems like way too many! And here's my favorite quote from the article:

Amtrak, the passenger rail service that once struggled to attract riders, is now so popular it may soon not have enough trains to meet demand.

Yeah! I'm going to be riding Amtrak from Tucson to New Orleans this October. Should be interesting... hopefully I see some tap dancing.

Countdown to Thesis (2)

So it's 10pm on Saturday night and I am working on my thesis. Well ok right now I'm writing on my blog. But I have something running....

I now have a 'schedule' which is probably pretty optimistic, but it ends with me having a rough draft of my thesis out by October 2nd. I am going to try really hard to stick to this schedule, however I think it's a little optimistic for 2 reasons:

1. I'll be gone for 10 days in September for the Interspeech conference. (According to my schedule I will be writing chapters 4 and 5 during that trip.)

2. I haven't actually done any experiments yet. Oops. :)

The good news is that I'm almost done with creating the features that I will need for my first set of experiments. I've also got a decent start on writing chapter 1 (intro) and chapter 2 (background).

The sort of pathetic news is that this is definitely the first time all summer that I have worked on a Saturday night. See, this is why grad school just doesn't work for me. When I don't have a really specific deadline, or some reason why I have to be in the lab, I just don't get anything done. Which reminds me, my Facebook group now has 24 people! :)

Strokin'

When my sister was in town, we went to a pretty awesome kareoke bar near Sean's place, called the Crescent Lounge. Some of the singing was pretty amazing (most amazing being our friend Joey, who sang Hey Jude with his beautiful angelic voice). Some of the singing was pretty un-amazing. A guy butchered "Foolish Games", which made me sad cause I *heart* that song. And some of the singing was HILARIOUS. One guy sang "Under the Sea". Major ROFL. When's the last time you've heard that song!?

And my absolute favorite... this little girl in a cute dress gets up and sings "Strokin'". I had somehow never heard this song, which just made it that much funnier, since I didn't know what kind of nonsense was coming until it was out of her mouth. If you haven't heard it, give it a listen. It's quite awesome.

Chuck!

I was reading the Starbucks blog, er, I mean working on my thesis, and I saw a list of Celebrity Starbucks Orders. Now, there aren't too many celebrities I care about, but you all know that I *heart* this guy....

Chuck Norris (lol) came into my old store once and ordered a regular iced tea. Tipped us $20 and he was super nice. I'm not a republican or Chuck Norris fan but he was really really cool and he even signed a napkin for a kid on the way out.

Crossing Against the Red Man

Today I was walking home from my Spanish class, after stopping at the PCC to pick up some groceries. (Yeah the uber-granola-crunchy PCC. I bought tofu. Whazzzup.) When I got to Stone, the light had just turned green, but no one had been around to push the pedestrian button. Of course I was just going to go anyway... there's plenty of time to cross without having the 'white man' there to guide you.

So as I'm about to cross, this girl on a scooter cuts me off. Ok, I guess she didn't know what I was going to do or whatever, that's fine. Plus you know, she's a girl. I know how we drive. ;) (Kidding!)

But then, as I start walking, a guy driving a truck honks at me. (Not a 'hey lady' honk, a 'get out of my way' honk.) I know that technically you shouldn't cross on a green light if the walk sign is red, but seriously?

Let me re-cap this situation. I'm walking home from the PCC carrying my groceries in my own bag. That guy was alone in a truck. Umm... according to Seattle rules, I win that one hands down.

Countdown to Thesis

I have been doing tons of fun stuff lately... my sister was here and we ran around all over the place. Jogging at Green Lake, chowing at Chipotle, shuffle-boarding at Big Time, sailing on Puget Sound, clubbin' at Neighbors, etc.

But now, it's time for me to work on my thesis. *Sad face*. I was inspired by this countdown to $200 oil to do a countdown of my own. Now my thesis will never really be worth $200... so I'm not too sure what metric would be appropriate for this countdown. I did make a spreadsheet to keep track of my to-do list. Unfortunately as I finish stuff on the list, new stuff pops up to replace it.

But here's where it's at now:

Total items: 42
Done items: 4

Wish me luck on this, guys! I was going to keep working on the thesis stuff tonight, but I accidentally made a new facebook group instead. It's about electrifying railroads... check it out!

You're Welcome

I hope everyone is enjoying the recent downturn in gas prices.... I normally hate to brag, but I just had to tell you guys - I singlehandedly did that! :)

How, you ask? Well, a couple weeks ago (I don't remember the exact date but let's call it July 10th) I purchased some shares in USO. It's a stock that tracks the price of crude oil futures. When I bought it, it was at about $114. Now it is at $93.

You're welcome!

BTW don't worry too much about my finances. I'm holding that one for the long term.... look at what happened to the price of caviar as that resources started depleting.

LOLing on the Bus

I read the most awesome poem on the bus (the 31 if you're curious) this morning. It's on the KC Metro website, but I'll just repost it here. This poem really spoke to me.

If I Were a Bus

If I were a bus I’d go to the rainbow sparkly store,
I’d go to aquarium sparkly land
I’d go to a castle
I’d go to rainbow sparklyland New York
I’d go all over the world
I’d go to Oochworm town
If I were a bus I’d go everywhere

When is a File not a File?

Ok unix gurus... I need your help again! I have two questions:

1. How did this happen?

bash-3.00$ ls htklats | head
{}
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr001.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr002.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr003.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr004.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr005.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr006.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr007.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr008.gz
1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr009.gz

2. How can I get rid of it? (Cause rm doesn't work).

bash-3.00$ rm {}
rm: cannot remove `{}': No such file or directory

Here's what else I know about this mutant "thing":

bash-3.00$ ls -l {}
ls: {}: No such file or directory


bash-3.00$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 amydash ssli 2 Aug 4 20:15 {} -> {}
lrwxrwxrwx 1 amydash ssli 88 Aug 4 20:16 1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr001.gz -> /g/ssli/transitory/amydash/emotion/forced_alignment/out/1087_03_37_05_20000706_usr001.gz