go blog !!!

Coincidences

2007-01-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

It begins with Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Saya Terbakar Amarah Sendiri" when I came across the writer's name: Andre Vltchek. After that, it's an array of coincidences. The movie: Terlena, The Breaking of a Nation. This article: Natural Disasters or Mass Murder?. All of him.

things that can become research agenda

2006-12-11T02:46:00.000-08:00

orientation-based evaluation metrics : output alone is inadequate but complete with alignment. Good translation has a good reordering, good reordering has a good orientation
phrase-boundary model : Suppose there are three phrases A B C D and A is a function word, A may inversely reorder B, B C or B C D under no penalty except language model in current model. How about letting the boundary's orientation (B C for B, C D for B C, and D for B C D) to judge it
Non-frequency based preference model : Again, suppose there are A B C D where B and C are function words and their orientation is already effective to their neighbor (B to A and C to D). At higher constituent, where should we pick as head (B or C)? We need a head preference model. Currently we just reward that with higher frequency. Is it nicer if we have P_pref(B|C) and P_pref(C|B) learned from training data.

kecil dan besar

2006-11-22T07:33:00.000-08:00

Dari sebuah milis :

kecilnya dicerca igit-igit damprat, tuanya suka ngeyel dan mengutuk

kecilnya tertelikung panasnya kekerasan, tuanya demen tengkar perang

kecilnya terolok-olok, tuanya maluan dan memalukan

kecilnya didorong bimbing, tuanya tabah ksatria

kecilnya dipupuk toleransi, tuanya sabar dan bijak

kecilnya dihargai, tuanya tak benci memuji

kecilnya berlimpah pemahaman dan penerimaan, tuanya mengerti kasih

kecilnya tak kekurangan pengakuan, tuanya akan tahu dan sadar diri

kecilnya dididik kejujuran, tuanya dapat dipercaya

kecilnya merasa aman, tuanya dapat bergaul diri dan orang lain

kecilnya diajari keramahan dan adil, tuanya dapat mengerti kedamaian

(kiriman Dorothy, 1972)

kecilnya bermasalah, tuanya selalu bikin masalah
kecilnya kurang perhatian, tuanya ngeyelan
kecilnya tahu gotong royong, tuanya bukan sektarian
kecilnya mendendam, tuanya cari-cari kesalahan lingkungan
kecilnya bodo, tuanya tak bisa membedakan ruang privat dan publik
......

"John loves Mary" or "Mary loves John"

2006-11-13T18:25:00.000-08:00

I believe that a man is meant for a girl and that's true for the other around, just like John loves Mary implies (hopefully) Mary loves John. However, that can't be true for "John kicks Mary" which doesn't imply anything near Mary kicking John.

In many SMT systems, language model plays a very big role in determining correct translation. Researchers at Google with virtually unlimited data can use the greatest-language-model-ever-built to filter out unrealistic translation. But imagine this scenario when you are translating a simple sentence and the top two best output of translation model are : "John loves Mary" and "Mary loves John". Or "John kicks Mary" and "Mary kicks John". All are grammatically correct, but there's no way the language model can tell which one is correct.

In this case, language model is useless and a little peek at source sentence would be a great help.

PS: May I change John with my name and Mary with her, so that she can love me too?... hahaha

thinking in a scrambled order

2006-11-08T06:28:00.000-08:00

Let me tell myself about my research. If I translate a Chinese sentence to English, I care not only about having the correct word translation but also the correct ordering. I am currently investigating the latter problem of reordering. PS: we call it reordering and not ordering because the objective is to reorder the sentence from the Chinese to English order. Oh, by the way, my research is statistical machine translation.

If I enjoy my first paragraph, then there must be a problem with the way I think. Ok, maybe "must" is a little bit too strong of a word. But if I analyze it closer, I will notice that I should have said something earlier to make it nicer.

My research is statistical machine translation, in particular I am investigating reordering problem. Let me be more specific about this problem. If I want to translate a Chinese sentence to English, I should care not only about getting the word translation correct but more importantly arranging them in an order that will be readable as a fluent English sentence. We call it reordering problem because usually the task is to reorder the Chinese-ordered translation to English order.

I admit I make a lot of ordering mistake in making my point across. I start with a lead with the hope of making people to understand what I'm saying but end up confuse them even at the very start. It is often the case that I am not sure about the point I want to make. When I write this paragraph, I edit it five times permissible in writing but not in oral presentation. When I challenge my believe about my point, I suspect that I automatically erase the prepared argumentation flow but only to find that my point is actually correct.

I think I have to increase the reordering accuracy in my way of thinking from now on, not only in translation quality.

PS: This is me talking to myself, so the pronoun is first person reflective...

only

2006-04-09T18:13:00.000-07:00

Ada indah, ada cerlang
ada merdu, ada harum
Semua ada, tapi hanya belaka
The only real thing is her

Engkau panglima bermuka dua !! Omie Lubis

2006-03-21T00:59:00.000-08:00

  Engkau tak pantas berhiaskan bintang dipundak mu
 bila semua dosamu harus kupikul di pundak ku
 Engkau tak pantas bersujud mencium sejadah
 bila kemunafikan mu harus kusangga
 Engkau tak pantas memanggilku sebagai anakmu
 bila kau tak pernah mencintaiku
 
 Seharusnya di lenganmu aku bergelayut
 seharusnya dalam senyum mu aku meraih mimpi
 seharusnya dimatamu aku memuja
 ketika aku merasa lelah dan putus asa
 seharusnya dipundak mu aku bertahan
 ketika hempasan badai tiba meronta
 
 Senjatamu bukan untuk melindungiku
 tapi untuk membunuhi saudara saudaraku
 kekuatan mu bukan untuk melindungiku
 tapi untuk melumpuhkanku
 
 kau sambut tangan musuh
 kau tepis rangkulanku
 kau suapi mulut musuh
 kau tampar mulutku
 kau sanjung musuh
 kau hina dinakan aku
 
 Panglima macam apakah kau ini????
 
 
 
 
 puisi ini kutulis untuk saudara2 ku di tanah air
 jiwa ku akan selalu bersama mu !
 
 Omie lubis

Amoral view of Anti Pornography and Pornographic Draft Bill

2006-03-20T16:38:00.000-08:00

Let me write my response to this controversial bill. But since I don't have access to the perfect information regarding the matter, let me refrain myself from supporting or rejecting the draft bill until then available. But my feeling tells me that there is something not right about the way the draft views the problem of pornography. My take about the problem of pornography is firm that the amount of pornographic consumed by the society is highly proportional to the lost of economic productivity. So it is rational enough for a nation (morally or economically) to fight pornography. So, let's support this draft? Well, not so soon.

Imagine that there is a perfect market with pornographic material as the only commodity, then this draft tries to address the overconsumption such a commodity. Honestly, I haven't read the draft thoroughly, but some discussions hint that the draft apparently regulates woman, media, art, etc: the supply side of the market. Well, what's wrong with that? Nothing wrong with that but if we are familiar with supply and demand curve, then we can immediately raise questions like what about the demand side of the market? Can we assume that the demand is suddenly gone when the supply is gone. Well, that's too much of an assumption. So, this draft neglects the supply side of the market too much. What happen if there is no supply to the market? Where the demand goes? Well, it can means several bad side-effects. One is certainly the thrive of black market, where there is no regulation to govern the market and the demand can go even wildly. There's also another side effect like smuggling and corruption, etc. I'm sure we don't want to go to this market of chaos.

How to remove this market of pornography then? One natural way is to remove the demand side of the market, not the supply. Afterall a market is created to benefit the consumer, no? As long as there is little demand, the commodity flooding the market will be left wasted. To remove pornography, my take is that the goverment should create a better curriculum for kids in school, go to religious institution and encourage them to strengthen the family institution, etc. OK, to remove demand is a lie, we can't just remove the power of the market, but here we can create another market with a substitute commodity, like a perfectly happy family, a high quality piece of art, a perfectly healthy job, etc. This market is there already, we just need to reinforce it.
Can we do that instantly? Well, there is a time lag for everything. While educating the demand side of the market, what we can do is tightening the production and distribution engine of the industry, discouraging people for producing and distributing this pornographic commodity. Again, as far as I'm concerned the draft concerns only on the production aspect of the industry, while put little attention to distribution or even consumption aspect of the market.

Another assumption made by this draft is that it can control this market perfectly and there is no other market. I hinted earlier a bit about black market (and substitute market additionally). Don't we have it now? Some if not most goes to internet to look for pornographic material, right? Instantly, we must feel nervous and raise many questions. How can we handle the demand and supply of this market? How are we going to regulate production and distribution of this virtual commodity? This draft does not answer these questions? This bill will be applicable to every internet user in the world? Yeah, right.

Now about the cost of this bill? Suppose the parliament passes this draft and become positive law. What should be done to make this bill effective? In the extreme cases, the police may have to allocate several man hours a day to perform anticipative action to make this pessimistic bill to effect, which includes patrolling and imposing deterrant effect to the society. Civil participation is preferable but we may risk a police state. Wow, that's so huge of a cost and still may not be so effective. But on the flip side, there is a good thing (at least for me). In the context of multimedia, we may need a software to block access to sites providing pornographic picture, material and sound. As a computer scientist, I really hope that the passing of this bill implies the latter, hence goverment is interested to invest on human capital and reasearch in natural language processing, image understanding, speech recognition, digital signal processing, etc. Which makes me so selfish, eventhough I know this draft bill is so bad, I don't firmly stand against it. Hey, we must and can be both morally and intellectually sound.

The moral of the story is not that are we against pornography or not, but there are many right ways and there are many wrong ways to fight pornography. If I set aside my selfishness, I should ask the goverment to find another alternative. If no, convince me with concrete data that it can be implemented efficiently.

Disclaimer: I'm a computer scientist not an economist, therefore I can make assumption and hypothesis as I like without having to have the empirical data in hand.

Some leftover from TP presentation

2006-03-20T02:32:00.000-08:00

Who is '95 non-linguistic grammar? NHT
Always two non-terminals? NHT
How to calculate expressiveness? NHT
What is MTG?
How does your previous works fit in your thesis? LWS
What additional work from translating from NE translation to full sentence translation ? NHT
How to compare versus Hiero/MTG? NHT
Why use sparse grammar when Hiero's coverage is 100%? NHT
Hiero's time/space complexity? LWS
How to evaluate the system? NHT
LM/RM evaluation separately? LHZ

Left behind in the field

2006-03-19T19:17:00.000-08:00

In my own words about:

[1] Machine Translation as Lexicalized Parsing with Hooks
Liang huang, Hao Zhang and Daniel Gildea

This paper mainly addresses decoding problem of Wu's ITG.
Although ITG as a joint model doesn't require a language model in theory, however ITG independence assumption (actually from context free grammar also) is too strong. In practice, it may lead to translation with no or little reordering. Therefore, a language model is beneficial.
Here, the application of language model is similar to lexicalization in modern parsing, but unlike modern parsing where we need to choose a head lexical for each rule, here the lexical is the boundary words.
Wu reports an algorithm of O(n^7) for ITG+bigram language. Here, with hook trick, we can achieve a lower complexity of O(n^6). The algorithm is basically a chart parser and the tricks is basically a algebraic manipulation of the original dynamic programming formula, inspired by previous research for other grammar. The hook trick achieves lower complexity by decomposing the dynamic programming algorithm in two steps.
For a more general grammar, the hook trick is able to reduce the complexity from O(n^(3+3(m-1))) to O(n^(3(m-1)+(2R+1))) with m-gram language and R-ary rules.

[2] Synchronous Binarization for Machine Translation
Liang Huang

The motivation brought from the previous paper: binary synchronous grammar is efficient (O(n^6) for bigram language model). Suppose we have arbitrary SMT system with lots of SCFG (Galley'04), then we can binarize them to obtain a more efficient decoding. However, arbitrary binarization is not beneficial to the space constraint, due to discontiguous span (we need to store the boundary words until the gaps are closed). Therefore, this paper only uses ITG-like binary SCFG.
In its experiment, it shows that 99.7% is binarizable (wow !!!) and 88.8% is monotonic in Chinese-English corpus with 50M English words.

While reading these two papers, I make some note:
- Naive parsing is unfavourable because of left-recursion, ambiguity and inefficient reparsing of subtrees. Especially the third, it is bad if we have a very long noun or verb phrase.
- Earley and CYK is a standard and well-known CFG parser. Both uses dynamic programming (worst case O(n^3)), but Earley is top-down approach while CYK is bottom-up.

Attic...

2006-03-07T04:28:00.000-08:00

The chill wind whispers the warmest.
The light afar winks saying hi, it's been a while.
I reply, my all yearning you all but ..
will you keep me tall when I fall

I feel differently (2)

2005-09-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

Ketika pesta telah usai, banyak pekerjaan yang harus diselesaikan
Meja harus dibersihkan, kursi harus dilipat
Makanan sisa dibuang, lantai disapu dan dipel, kemudian lampu dimatikan
Tinggal hening yang tinggal menunggu pesta selanjutnya
Masihkah tersisa keriangan satu jam yang lalu dengan tawa palsu-nya yang lebar
Sudah lama aku tidak bertemu tetapi dirimu yang setahun yang lalu masih tinggal

I feel differently (1)

2005-09-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

Ada orang mengingat kisah kasihnya yang sudah mati di taman bunga,
sendiri dengan dengung kumbang di telinga
Ada orang merindukan kekasihnya yang telah pergi di pantai berpasir,
hanya ditemani ombak menggulung
Namun aku mengenang engkau disini, di dalam hati,
di tempat engkau selalu berada selama ini

At The Movies

2005-06-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

A song lyric from "Falling and Spinning" a musical production by NUS VCF (http://www.vcfnus.org/). The song is sang by a couple calling and answering each other. It start out with the boy (Miles) looking for help and spotted the girl (Leah) working with her laptop.

At The Movies
Lyrics: Joshua Sng
Music: Lin Junwen

"You've Got Mail"

Oh the Movie?
It's a nine on my scale

Actually I meant your email
but the movie's good too
I guess that's my cue

To return to your crew
You know
You know you had me at hello

I did? Isn't that from some show
TOM CRUISE and ZELLWEGER

"Jerry McGuire"
Not too bad, Sir

But I've forgotten why I'm here
Isn't this a little queer
It's like I've seen this at the movies

Take your time and figure it out
Don't worry I won't pout

Wouldn't mind if you do
You'd look a little like DREW
When ADAM sang
"I wanna grow old with you"

That's a little cheeky
like GREGORY PECK
In "Breakfast at Tiffany's"

Don't tell me
You're HOLLY GOLIGHTLY
with her long graceful neck

who never did pick up the cheque

Well this sure is getting
A little unsettling

Yes, I know
It'd be more apropos
At the Bijou
I think I might've seen this at the movies

I think I remember
That Christmas is in December
Or that it was KEANUIn "Sweet November"
Oh that film made me bluebut the reason we're talking ..

Because it's me you're stalking

No! You don't really think that
Yikes, I sound like JACK NICHOLSON
In "As Good As It Gets"

Maybe it's "Serendipity"
Like "When Harry Met Sally"

Or in every other comedy

Romantic! Just the remedy
For a broken heart
Every dripping sappy love part

This is beginning to seem
Like a familiar scene

From the silver screen

Haven't I seen this at the movies

Maybe dreams don't only come true
On celluloid

Pretty please, no Freud

How about the bard
He's not Avant-Garde
We
Could be like Shakespeare

In Love
When Romeo loved Juliet dear

Not cheap romance on TV
We'll stroll by the bay
Like those two in "Il Mare"

Will there be happy endings

Didn't you catch "Four Weddings

Yes, and A Funeral"

It won't be ephemeral

I suppose you'll be HUGH

And you'll be JULIA
In "Nothing Hill"

My heart's beating faster
Still

We'll go on "50 First Dates"

We'll leave that to the fates
Let's start with one
So the guy gets the girl
I feel like TOM HANKS
In "Sleepless in Seattle"

How about that
It's something from a screenplay
When love chases the clouds away
And sunshine's solitary ray
Lights up a wonderful day
Haven't we seen this somewhere at the movies

I'm Miles
And I have no idea

Leah, I'm Leah

You wouldn't happen to be a
Princess

In your eyes, I hope, Yes

Now I remember
Wanna help out at the stall

We'll have a ball

Movies, I Wish To Watch List...

2005-06-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed recent discussion with Rama and Edward about movies. Somehow, they educate me a lot about movie over this past few years and, of course, like any other passionates, they transfer their passion to me. Towards fulfilling the desire, here is the list of movies, I can't wait to watch (in the mean time) :
1. Il Postino
2. Jerry Macguire
3. Citizen Cane
4. Scent of Green Papaya
5. Fitzcarraldo
6. Andini recommended "Citizen Kane"
7. Chungkin Express.. guess, I need a few more look to appreciate it
8. Farewell My Concubine
9. Taxi Driver
10. Breakfast at Tifanny's
Hmm... can't wait to watch them all..

June 16th

2005-06-16T02:08:00.000-07:00

I'm reading another ACL paper series. Disclaimer, all the review is based on my own opinion and not suppose to be referred outside this page or outside me !!!

1. Multi-Engine Machine Translation Guided By Explicit Word Matching, Shyamsundar Jayaraman, Alvon Lie, CMU ACL 2005.
This Multi-Engine MT combines the output of several machine translation engine and reconstruct the translation through several steps:
1. Word Alignment Matcher. It first sounds like another complicated statistical alignment model, but fortunately, it just only a word matcher. No parameter learning, no EM algorithm.. It's just try to construct alignment based on word matching.
2. Basic Hypothesis Generation. Here, we must recall ourselves that this paper is not about reranking multiple translation output, but about constructing the translation hypothesis from several translation output. This step can be summarized as the process to produce synthetic combinations of words and phrases from the original translations that satisfy a set of adequacy constraint. The notion of adequacy constraint refers the constraint that the words in the hypothesis adequately represent a translation.
3. Scoring. Yes, the final step is to attach a score to each hypothesis and pick the best one. In scoring the hypothesis, they are concern with the issue of translation of different length. To normalize the translation by calculating a geometric average per word score. They also exploit the confidence score of each translation out which is reflected on the confidence score. They also consider the language model score.

Korupsi, Berhulu Ekonomi, Berhilir Politik

2005-06-14T23:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.kompas.com/kompas%2Dcetak/0506/14/opini/1817008.htm
Oleh Dita Indah Sari

DALAM satu kesempatan, Pramoedya Ananta Toer pernah menyampaikan pendapat, korupsi merebak karena tingkat konsumsi nasional lebih tinggi daripada produksi nasional. (Keadaan) ini melahirkan korupsi.
Pernyataan yang singkat, lugas, dan orisinal ini sungguh menggelitik. Pernyataan ini mengundang pertanyaan apakah keadaan kapitalisme Indonesia secara alamiah melahirkan benua korupsi?

Dosa kolonialisme

Sejarah memberi jawaban. Kolonialisme telah merampas begitu banyak dari negeri ini. Ekonomi kolonial membuat Indonesia sekadar menjadi sumber bahan mentah, buruh murah, dan pasar. Kita dibuat tak mampu mengelola sumber alam, gagal mengembangkan sumber daya manusia, bahkan tak mampu membangun industri nasional yang kokoh.
Para pengusaha Tionghoa, yang mencoba merintis ekonomi nasional yang mandiri, dihancurkan penguasa kolonial, dengan seperangkat kebijakan diskriminasi, atau dengan pembantaian massal, seperti terjadi di Batavia tahun 1740. Kegiatan ekonomi golongan pribumi dan Tionghoa lalu dijauhkan dari wilayah produksi, dilokalisasi ke areal perdagangan semata.
Hasil cangkokan kolonialisme Belanda adalah: kapitalisme Indonesia tidak secuil pun mewarisi karakter positif dan progresivitas ibu kandungnya, kapitalisme Barat. Ia tidak menciptakan industrialis nasional yang mandiri seperti saat kaum kapitalis India dengan gagah menghadapi penjajah Inggris dengan taktik boikotnya, swadesi. Pun tidak menghadirkan kelas menengah perkotaan/pesisir yang kuat dan independen karena kolonialisme telah menghancurkan bibit-bibitnya.

Sebelumnya, bahkan Raja Mataram Sultan Agung telah meluluhlantakkan negeri-negeri pesisir seperti Surabaya, sebuah bandar internasional tempat perhentian arus rempah-rempah, tempat kelas pedagang sebagai cikal bakal borjuasi tumbuh dan berkembang. Golongan menengah pun terkapar atau lari ke pedalaman dan budaya agraris dengan sistem upetinya kembali mendominasi. Selanjutnya penguasa feodal agraris dengan seluruh budaya agrarisnya dihancurkan dan sepenuhnya dikendalikan merkantilis Eropa. Penguasa kolonial lalu menciptakan birokrasi kaum priayi sebagai pengganti kelas menengah, golongan oportunis yang bergantung penjajah.
Pedagang, bukan industrialis

Maka, bisa terlihat seberapa besar kapasitas rakyat Indonesia menjadi bangsa yang produktif. Setelah hampir seluruh potensi rakyat dibabat habis (juga dengan tanam paksa dan romusa), "kelas baru" yang dibentuk pun tak lain dari kaum menengah bermental pedagang, bukan industrialis atau enterprenuer yang mampu beroperasi secara mandiri dan profesional dalam mencari keuntungan. Golongan ini cuma menjadi perantara distribusi barang dan jasa, dengan mencari >kern 199m<>f 3002kern 200m<>f 3001< setinggi-tingginya, dengan nilai produktivitas rendah. Persekutuannya dengan birokrasi priayi warisan kolonial yang feodal dan doyan upeti menghasilkan korupsi yang kita kenal kini.

Kalaupun sejumlah pengusaha domestik ada yang dapat membangun usaha berskala menengah atau besar, resepnya adalah ketergantungan yang besar terhadap para priayi birokrat. Sedikit sekali yang disebabkan profesionalisme dan produktivitas tinggi.

Situasi ekonomi global kini lebih sulit bagi inisiatif domestik. Sebab, perkembangan modal domestik amat bergantung pada kepentingan modal internasional. Ketergantungan akan modal, teknologi, dan sumber daya memunculkan priayi pejabat yang lalu bertindak sebagai "makelar" atau "calo" bagi kepentingan modal internasional. Pelan-pelan, republik hanya menjadi pasar dan distributor, bukan produsen atau negeri penghasil.
Republik yang tidak produktif

Struktur kapitalisme Indonesia yang rendah kemampuan berproduksinya membuat rendah produktivitas rakyat. Celakanya, di Indonesia tak tersedia syarat-syarat untuk membangun human capital yang tangguh dan produktif, antara lain karena mahalnya biaya pendidikan dan kesehatan.
Korupsi adalah akibat rendahnya tingkat produktivitas sumber daya manusia. Terlalu rendah untuk dapat menghargai kerja dan pencapaian sehingga manusia Indonesia ingin segera mendapatkan hasil besar tanpa ingin bekerja keras.

Sebaliknya, konsumsi kian meningkat akibat stimulasi kepentingan pasar untuk memperoleh keuntungan besar. Kondisi ini bertemu hancurnya produktivitas nasional akibat rendahnya teknologi dan sumber daya. Maka, korupsi kian merebak. Korupsi bukan sumber bobroknya kapitalisme nasional. Ia adalah ekses akumulasi kapitalisme model kolonial yang tak tertangani pemerintah.
Solusi
Tanpa mengubah struktur perekonomian, korupsi akan tetap menghantui masyarakat yang rendah produktivitas. Solusi dramatis dalam wilayah hukum memang urgen, tetapi ia hanya akan mampu memecahkan korupsi dalam skala tertentu. Lemahnya institusi publik yang dapat menjadi operator UU (yang isinya paling progresif sekalipun) membuat hukum dibingkai banyak keterbatasan.

Demokrasi liberal kita juga membuat program pemberantasan korupsi baru menyentuh pemain "pinggiran", bukan koruptor kakap dan kroni yang telah menjarah uang rakyat sekian belas tahun. Jika demokrasi liberal berjalan dalam koridor yang konsisten, KPK tidak perlu memakai jurus "jebak-menjebak". Cukup dengan melihat salah satu orang KPU menggunakan mobil Jaguar atau tinggal di rumah mewah, penangkapan dapat dilakukan. Berikutnya, tinggal mereka buktikan sendiri dari mana barang-barang "tidak wajar" itu mereka peroleh.

Produktivitas rendah yang merupakan ladang subur perilaku korup harus diatasi dengan serangkaian kebijakan ekonomi. Peningkatan teknologi nasional menjadi hal vital. Selain akan memperbaiki skill dan kapasitas pekerja dalam berinteraksi dengan mesin high tech, juga akan mengurangi ketergantungan kita pada negeri lain. Semakin produktif satu usaha, semakin efisien biaya yang dikeluarkan, sehingga upah/gaji bisa didorong lebih tinggi. Penguasaan teknologi dan ilmu pengetahuan memunculkan kesadaran baru untuk lebih menghargai kerja sehingga "mental broker" perlahan-lahan terpinggirkan. Kerja kemudian tidak dilihat semata sebagai aktivitas mencari penghasilan, tetapi sebagai arena eksistensi dan ekspresi kemanusiaan.

Komersialisasi sektor pendidikan dan kesehatan harus ditekan sekuat mungkin, sementara privatisasi sektor-sektor ini perlu ditiadakan. Kualitas pendidikan dan kesehatan rakyat Indonesia yang anjlok membuat pemerintah "dipaksa" menghentikan liberalisasi di kedua sektor ini. Kursus-kursus keterampilan harus dibuka seluas dan semurah mungkin dengan kualitas yang baik.
Beranikah pemerintah SBY melakukan dua perubahan besar atas sistem ekonomi kita, yaitu koreksi besar sistem kapitalisme Indonesia serta sikap mandiri terhadap tekanan kapitalisme global? Sekali lagi, sudah terlalu banyak yang dirampas oleh kolonialisme, termasuk kesempatan menjadi bangsa beretos kerja tinggi.

Apakah pemerintah masih butuh lebih banyak bukti kehancuran peradaban sebelum berani melakukan terobosan?

Dita Indah Sari Ketua Umum Partai Rakyat Demokratik

Fiorina's Commencement Address

2005-06-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2005/tc2005059_6954.htm

Thank you, Chancellor, and good morning. I'd like to join Chancellor Renick in welcoming all of you to the 114th commencement exercises of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

My fellow job seekers: I am honored to be among the first to congratulate you on completing your years at North Carolina A&T. But all of you should know: as Mother's Day gifts go, this one is going to be tough to beat in the years ahead.The purpose of a commencement speaker is to dispense wisdom. But the older I get, the more I realize that the most important wisdom I've learned in life has come from my mother and my father. Before we go any further, let's hear it one more time for your mothers and mother figures, fathers and father figures, family, and friends in the audience today.When I first received the invitation to speak here, I was the CEO of an $80 billion Fortune 11 company with 145,000 employees in 178 countries around the world. I held that job for nearly six years. It was also a company that hired its fair share of graduates from North Carolina A&T. You could always tell who they were. For some reason, they were the ones that had stickers on their desks that read, "Beat the Eagles."But as you may have heard, I don't have that job anymore. After the news of my departure broke, I called the school, and asked: do you still want me to come and be your commencement speaker?Chancellor Renick put my fears to rest. He said, "Carly, if anything, you probably have more in common with these students now than you did before." And he's right. After all, I've been working on my resume. I've been lining up my references. I bought a new interview suit. If there are any recruiters here, I'll be free around 11.I want to thank you for having me anyway. This is the first public appearance I've made since I left HP. I wanted very much to be here because this school has always been set apart by something that I've believed very deeply; something that takes me back to the earliest memories I have in life.One day at church, my mother gave me a small coaster with a saying on it. During my entire childhood, I kept this saying in front of me on a small desk in my room. In fact, I can still show you that coaster today. It says: "What you are is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift to God."Those words have had a huge impact on me to this day. What this school and I believe in very deeply is that when we think about our lives, we shouldn't be limited by other people's stereotypes or bigotry. Instead, we should be motivated by our own sense of possibility. We should be motivated by our own sense of accomplishment. We should be motivated by what we believe we can become. Jesse Jackson has taught us; Ronald McNair taught us; the Greensboro Four taught us; that the people who focus on possibilities achieve much more in life than people who focus on limitations.The question for all of you today is: how will you define what you make of yourself?To me, what you make of yourself is actually two questions. There's the "you" that people see on the outside. And that's how most people will judge you, because it's all they can see – what you become in life, whether you were made President of this, or CEO of that, the visible you.But then, there's the invisible you, the "you" on the inside. That's the person that only you and God can see. For 25 years, when people have asked me for career advice, what I always tell them is don't give up what you have inside. Never sell your soul – because no one can ever pay you back.What I mean by not selling your soul is don't be someone you're not, don't be less than you are, don't give up what you believe, because whatever the consequences that may seem scary or bad -- whatever the consequences of staying true to yourself are -- they are much better than the consequences of selling your soul.You have been tested mightily in your life to get to this moment. And all of you know much better than I do: from the moment you leave this campus, you will be tested. You will be tested because you won't fit some people's pre-conceived notions or stereotypes of what you're supposed to be, of who you're supposed to be. People will have stereotypes of what you can or can't do, of what you will or won't do, of what you should or shouldn't do. But they only have power over you if you let them have power over you. They can only have control if you let them have control, if you give up what's inside.

I speak from experience. I've been there. I've been there, in admittedly vastly different ways -- and in many ways, in the fears in my heart, exactly the same places. The truth is I've struggled to have that sense of control since the day I left college.

I was afraid the day I graduated from college. I was afraid of what people would think. Afraid I couldn't measure up. I was afraid of making the wrong choices. I was afraid of disappointing the people who had worked so hard to send me to college.I had graduated with a degree in medieval history and philosophy. If you had a job that required knowledge of Copernicus or 12th Century European monks, I was your person. But that job market wasn't very strong.So, I was planning to go to law school, not because it was a lifelong dream – because I thought it was expected of me. Because I realized that I could never be the artist my mother was, so I would try to be the lawyer my father was. So, I went off to law school. For the first three months, I barely slept. I had a blinding headache every day. And I can tell you exactly which shower tile I was looking at in my parent's bathroom on a trip home when it hit me like a lightning bolt. This is my life. I can do what I want. I have control. I walked downstairs and said, "I quit."I will give my parents credit in some ways. That was 1976. They could have said, "Oh well, you can get married." Instead, they said, "We're worried that you'll never amount to anything." It took me a while to prove them wrong. My first job was working for a brokerage firm. I had a title. It was not "VP." It was "receptionist." I answered phones, I typed, I filed. I did that for a year. And then, I went and lived in Italy, teaching English to Italian businessmen and their families. I discovered that I liked business. I liked the pragmatism of it; the pace of it. Even though it hadn't been my goal, I became a businessperson.I like big challenges, and the career path I chose for myself at the beginning was in one of the most male-dominated professions in America. I went to work for AT&T. It didn't take me long to realize that there were many people there who didn't have my best interests at heart.I began my career as a first level sales person within AT&T's long lines department. Now, "long lines" is what we used to call the long distance business, but I used to refer to the management team at AT&T as the "42 longs" – which was their suit size, and all those suits – and faces – looked the same.I'll never forget the first time my boss at the time introduced me to a client. With a straight face, he said "this is Carly Fiorina, our token bimbo." I laughed, I did my best to dazzle the client, and then I went to the boss when the meeting was over and said, "You will never do that to me again."In those early days, I was put in a program at the time called the Management Development Program. It was sort of an accelerated up-or-out program, and I was thrown into the middle of a group of all male sales managers who had been there quite a long time, and they thought it was their job to show me a thing or two. A client was coming to town and we had decided that we were getting together for lunch to introduce me to this customer who was important to one of my accounts.Now the day before this meeting was to occur, one of my male colleagues came to me and said, "You know, Carly, I'm really sorry. I know we've had this planned for a long time, but this customer has a favorite restaurant here in Washington, D.C., and they really want to go to that restaurant, and we need to do what the customer wants, and so I don't think you'll be able to join us.""Why is that?" I asked. Well, the restaurant was called the Board Room. Now, the Board Room back then was a restaurant on Vermont Avenue in Washington, D.C., and it was a strip club. In fact, it was famous because the young women who worked there would wear these completely see-through baby doll negligees, and they would dance on top of the tables while the patrons ate lunch.The customer wanted to go there, and so my male colleagues were going there. So I thought about it for about two hours. I remember sitting in the ladies room thinking, "Oh God, what am I going to do? And finally I came back and said, "You know, I hope it won't make you too uncomfortable, but I think I'm going to come to lunch anyway."Now, I have to tell you I was scared to death. So the morning arrived when I had to go to the Board Room and meet my client, and I chose my outfit carefully. I dressed in my most conservative suit. I carried a briefcase like a shield of honor. I got in a cab. When I told the taxi driver where I wanted to go he whipped around in his seat and said, "You're kidding right?" I think he thought I was a new act.

In any event, I arrived, I got out, I took a deep breath, I straightened my bow tie, and went in the door - and you have to picture this - I go into the door, there's a long bar down one side, there's a stage right in front of me, and my colleagues are sitting way on the other side of the room. And there's a live act going on the stage. The only way I could get to them was to walk along that stage. I did. I looked like a complete idiot. I sat down, we had lunch.

Now, there are two ends to that story. One is that my male colleagues never did that to me again. But the other end to the story, which I still find inspiring, is that all throughout lunch they kept trying to get those young women to dance in their negligees on top of our table -- and every one of those young women came over, looked the situation over and said, "Not until the lady leaves."It even followed me to HP. As you may know, the legend of HP is that it began in a garage. When I took over, we launched a get-back-to-basics campaign we called "the rules of the garage." A fellow CEO at a competitor saw that and decided to do a skit about me. In front of the entire financial analyst and media community, he had an actress come out with blond hair and long red nails and flashy clothes, and had a garage fall on her head. It made big headlines locally. It made me feel a lot like the "token bimbo" all over again.I know all of you have your own stories. When you challenge other people's ideas of who or how you should be, they may try to diminish and disgrace you. It can happen in small ways in hidden places, or in big ways on a world stage. You can spend a lifetime resenting the tests, angry about the slights and the injustices. Or, you can rise above it. People's ideas and fears can make them small – but they cannot make you small. People's prejudices can diminish them – but they cannot diminish you. Small-minded people can think they determine your worth. But only you can determine your worth.At every step along the way, your soul will be tested. Every test you pass will make you stronger.But let's not be naïve. Sometimes, there are consequences to not selling your soul. Sometimes, there are consequences to staying true to what you believe. And sometimes, those consequences are very difficult. But as long as you understand the consequences and accept the consequences, you are not only stronger as a result, you're more at peace.Many people have asked me how I feel now that I've lost my job. The truth is, I'm proud of the life I've lived so far, and though I've made my share of mistakes, I have no regrets. The worst thing I could have imagined happened. I lost my job in the most public way possible, and the press had a field day with it all over the world. And guess what? I'm still here. I am at peace and my soul is intact. I could have given it away and the story would be different. But I heard the word of Scripture in my head: "What benefit will it be to you if you gain the whole world, but lose your soul?"When people have stereotypes of what you can't do, show them what you can do. When they have stereotypes of what you won't do, show them what you will do. Every time you pass these tests, you learn more about yourself. Every time you resist someone else's smaller notion of who you really are, you test your courage and your endurance. Each time you endure, and stay true to yourself, you become stronger and better.I do not know any of you personally. But as a businessperson and a former CEO, I know that people who have learned to overcome much can achieve more than people who've never been tested. And I do know that this school has prepared you well. After all, North Carolina A&T graduates more African Americans with engineering degrees than any other school in the United States. It graduates more African American technology professionals than any other school. It graduates more African American women who go into careers in science, math, and technology than any other school. Your motto is right: North Carolina A&T is truly a national resource and a local treasure. And Aggie Pride is not just a slogan – it's a hard-earned fact!Never sell your education short. And the fact that this school believed in you means you should never sell yourself short. What I have learned in 25 years of managing people is that everyone possesses more potential than they realize. Living life defined by your own sense of possibility, not by others notions of limitations, is the path to success.Starting today, you are one of the most promising things America has to offer: you are an Aggie with a degree.My hope is that you live life defined by your own sense of possibility, your own sense of worth, your own sense of your soul. Define yourself for yourself, not by how others are going to define you – and then stick to it. Find your own internal compass. I use the term compass, because what does a compass do? When the winds are howling, and the storm raging, and the sky is so cloudy you have nothing to navigate by, a compass tells you where true North is. And I think when you are in a lonely situation, you have to rely on that compass. Who am I? What do I believe? Do I believe I am doing the right thing for the right reason in the best way that I can? Sometimes, that's all you have. And always, it will be enough.Most people will judge you by what they see on the outside. Only you and God will know what's on the inside. But at the end of your life, if people ask you what your greatest accomplishment was, my guess is, it will be something that happened inside you, that no one else ever saw, something that had nothing to do with outside success, and everything to do with how you decide to live in the world.What you are today is God's gift to you. What you make of yourself is your gift to God. He is waiting for that gift right now. Make it something extraordinary.

Text of Commencement address by Steve Jobs

2005-06-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my patents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that your are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

June 14th

2005-06-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

Five days of lesser night..
I've finish my first writing-good-paper lesson, though frustrating but many lessons learnt.
1. Don't mix the practical issues to the theoritical paper.. putting it into experimental section is wiser..
2. Capitalize your points in the discussion, don't put the discussion after your points. It'll just conceal your claims...
3. many more.. as I always carelessly forgetful

Ok.. now start reading some more..
1. Clause Restructuring for Statistical Machine Translation. Michael Collins, Koehn, .. MIT, ACL'05
Describe a method for incorporating syntactic information in statistical machine translation. Basically, their method falls into pre-processing stage in SMT. The goal is to revocer an underlying word order that is closer to the target language than the original string. The reordering is applied as a pre-processing step in both training and decoding phases. Well, I think it's quite clever =) These guys must be good engineers. They shift the burden to model word-ordering to the preprocessing stage. However, they also relies on the availability of the parser on both side language and also the handcrafted rules requires lots of linguistic experties. Both which I don't want to afford. Improvement to phrase-based system is also demonstrated.
Which specific problem they attack? Long phrase movement. It's rather difficult to model long phrase movement using movement distance or position based distortion model since it's rarely occur in the corpus.
Why their method works? They shift the burden of having to model long phrase movement to the preprocessing stage.
Limitation? Parser? How to get a parser for an arbitrarily language pair? How about the handcrafted rules?
Possible improvement? Hmm... I'm intrigued to use alignment information to do the reordering, instead of parser =)....
Overall this paper is just nice (of course, it will published in the upcoming leading ACL conference). It provide a good insight for the linguistic phenomenon they want to address. It also discuss about statistical significance of the BLEU score, just like Koehn's paper. Haven't understand completely though..

2. Another ACL'05 paper, but this one is workshop paper. Hybrid Example-Based SMT: the Best of Both Worlds? Declan Groves and Andy Way.
A strong proponent and a true believer of EBMT =) This paper introduce one interesting latin term "sine qua non" pronounced "si-ni-"kwä-'nän" that means "something absolutely indispensable or essential".
This paper is easy to read, the title is eye catching. But the content is somehow to superficial. They just do a series of experiments using phrase translation extracted from GIZA++ and their marker based EBMT. Well, I guess I have to read their previous paper.

June 9th 2005

2005-06-08T21:15:00.000-07:00

Five days to submission date.
I just woke up from my little tiny bit of sleep. Barely managed to drag my body to school. Currently, enjoying Joni Mitchell's Both Side Now.. color the ambience in CL the place I am now. Gladly, that I finish my first iteration for IJCNLP paper.

One song just kick in and I definitely want to picture it into words...

"Apa yang kau alami kini, mungkin tak dapat engkau mengerti
Satu hal tanamkan di hati, indah semua yang Tuhan beri..

Tuhan-mu tak akan memberi ular beracun pada yang minta roti
Cobaan yang engkau hadapi, tak melebihi kekuatanmu

Tangan Tuhan sedang merenda suatu karya yang indah mulia
Saatnya kan tiba nanti, kau lihat pelangi kasihnya."

June 7th 2005

2005-06-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

I started out a little bit earlier than yesterday. Skimming through many unimportant emails, browsing some news site, then Hieu (my lab's intern) came and asked for my help. After all those, I managed to start properly my revision endevour from 10. Now is 11:20, and it's quite fruitful.. one and a half page. 30% progress..

5:15 now, just review the first five pages for the first iteration as I felt something bogged me down to continue the writing revision.

11:45 and finish second section. Quite satisfied with the first part of this section.

June 6th 2005

2005-06-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

Today, I started the day a little bit late. After heated discussion during lunch, I finally got some time to revise my own paper. Initially, I intend to finish everything before dinner. After all, it's just paraphrasing the original content to articulate my claims and ideas, which somehow concealed in the complexity and absurdity of my draft writing.

However, until this late hour, I am still stuck with the second section and feeling rather depressed about how bad my writing was and is and is to come. I just move from the motivation to the formulation section. How slow I am as slow as a snail. The formulation section should be straightforward, however, I need to refrain myself from abusing the mathematical notation here. C'mon reviewer, it's difficult to say them in plain English.

I think I should hurry myself on this. Even though the submission deadline is due next monday, but I already off target draft submission to my supervisor. You know what else tiring, converting LaTeX into Word. I haven't finish even half.

To Do tommorow:
- Focus on polishing Section 2 and 3, haven't think about section 3.4.
- Ask Rama for example.. need it urgently
- Reformat the paper in Word.

I think the items above will force me to stay inside my lab for quite sometimes. Claustrophobically me is screaming !!!

Already borrow nice book, Free Trade Under Fire by Douglas A. Irwin. A book recommended by Nick, my friend in HK.

June 5th 2005

2005-06-04T20:06:00.000-07:00

Ok, I admit to myself. I'm not wholeheartedly researcher-wannabe. I just intrigue with the passion I have inside myself, by which I am easily ignited to engage everything, ranging from those which involves heavily left brain, right brain or no brain at all. Does it always about brain?

Last night, after bad-basketball-session-that-I-do-not-want-to-mention-anymore, I finally sat down on the couch in my favourite position ready to hibernate, switch my television to Channel 8... and there you go... "Zhou Yu's train"... gosh... I should be doing revision for my paper... the deadline is coming near, but surely Gong Li is damn irresistable.. I thought goddess always from Greek, but this one is halfway around the globe. It's about a woman's determined search for love. Ok, I'm not always that shallow, the movie is beautifully shot and the pace is just perfectly fit with the mood. Fractured narrative add the curiosity and confusion to the movie. The script is frugal and carefully written to articulate the theme. The 'making love' scene is so intense by-no-mean disgusting... the scene intertwined with moving train.. getting faster.. more... and more.. The last scene is so conclusive..

Most memorable quote: “If the moon can be both round and crescent, then a lake can be empty and full. If it's in your heart, then it's real. If it's not, then it never will be.”

Me, wannabe...what!!!!

June 3rd 2005

2005-06-03T06:18:00.000-07:00

I think it is a good idea for a researcher to keep notes for everything he has done in one day. Since the blog provides exactly what I "need" as a researcher-wannabe (I just wonder when HTML will really embed scientific notation), there is no more excuse not to blog. But for the reader, except me myself, as disclaimer, do be extremely cautious, there will be many boring-to-death material piled-up here. So, get out while you are out.

Today chores:
Of course, chew as many paper as possible, hope to swallow a little bit more but definitely not those with choking hazard on it, and digest bit by bit. Here are my today reading list:
- Statistical Significance Tests for Machine Translation Evaluation, by Philipp Koehn (EMNLP'04)
- Learning Translation of Named-Entity Phrases from Parallel Corpora, by Robert C. Moore (EACL'03)
- Robust Sub-Sentential Alignment of Phrase-Structure Trees, by Declan Groves, et al (COLING'04)
- Automatic Discovery of Non-Compositional Compounds in Parallel Data, by Melamed (EMNLP'04)
- Towards a Simple and Acurate Statistical Approach to Learning Translation Relationship among Words, by Robert C. Moore (EACL'01).

BTW, my current research interest is Statistical Machine Translation, which falls under Natural Language Processing or Computational Linguistics. I would recommend wikipedia.org for those who somehow intrigued with my research interest. But basically, my research tries to translate this article in English into, say, some lost ancient language of hieroglyph. Nay, don't buy that, it is not lost and who bother to translate this to dead language. Into bahasa Indonesia or bahasa Sunda would be nice examples.

Yesterday, Bernard gave me a bunch of really interesting books, one of them : The Christian Mindset in A Secular Society, by Carl F. H. Henry and just finished the first 20 pages of this old books and hungry for no less. In return (well, not actually), I helped him to terminate 15 unit of crabs. I particularly found the process damn fun, especially clinching the claws while it still alive.

As for tommorow, I have to go for my weekly Bible and basket session !!!! I don't know whether I can't make it to the basketball session, as I have to meet up with my friends to decide on the curicullum.

What !!! This should be a junkyard for a researcher-wannabe not his life journal.....