Wednesday, October 22, 2003 A Great Day By Diana Hsieh @ 8:18 PM Today has been a most excellent day. First, I had only very, very mild problems with migraines. The beta-blockers seem to be kicking in. Second, in my Aristotle class, we discussed a rather interesting and fundamental objection to Gilbert Ryle's argument that philosophy of mind is shot through with a "category mistake" concerning mind and body. (Perhaps I'll post on that later.) Third, I had a fun time arguing about a priori knowledge and intuitions while out for drinks with other grad students and Mike Huemer after Epistemology class. Fourth, I had an interesting chat with Mike Huemer about dualism and other theories of mind before heading home. Fifth, I found out that my article on false excuses has been accepted for publication by The Journal of Value Inquiry with only editorial changes needed. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! This is huge for me. This is what made a good day absolutely fucking great. Sixth, I found my glasses sitting on one of our recliners, where they had been hidden under a blanket for the past week. After two weeks of migraine hell, I deserved a day like this, dammit. And wow, has it ever been sweet! Link / Noodles / Trackback Translation Services By Diana Hsieh @ 10:06 AM A while ago, I got this spam advertising translation services. Let's just say that, based upon the quality of the English in the letter, I won't be hiring them anytime soon. Dear Sir or Madam: I am the general manager of Beijing Huayi Translation Co.,Ltd, that is a professional translation company based in Beijing. we supply high quality translation service. I hope to have opportunity to supply you with translation service. Our company is skilled in Chinese translation, especially in English-Chinese, Chinese-English, French-Chinese Chinese-French, German-Chinese, Chinese-German, Japanese-Chinese, Chinese-Japanese, Japanese-Chinese, Chinese-Japanese, Russian-Chinese, Chinese-Russian, Korean-Chinese and Chinese-Korean translation projects. We have finished many big projects and made many achievements in the translation industry. We have good and long-term relationships with many famous international corporations, for example, P&G, Delaware Corporation, Multiling Corporation, many governmental organizations of China and big publishing houses. We have translated about 30 books from English to Chinese for some famous press house of China. We once translated technical material of many big projects, for example, China West-East Gas Pipeline Project of PetroChina. There are 8 full-time employees and 1500 full time and part-time translators in my company. Our weekly turnout is 250 thousand words and the monthly turnout is 1 million words. Almost all of our translators are professional translators with many experience and good education background. Most of our managers and full-time employees of our company have doctor degree or master degree in science, law or other specialties. Our translation business mainly includes following fields: Medicine & medical instrument (15%); Computer & IT (15%); Chemistry, Biology & chemical engineering (10%); Law (10%); Economy and management (10%); Finance and Insurance (5%) ; Traffic & railway (5%); Mechanism (5%); Architecture (5%); Culture and People (3%); Geology and Environment Protection (3%); Commerce (2%); Education (2%); Others (10%). We mainly translate through traditional way by human being, and at the same time we can use computer-aided translation software to do translation work. We have many copies of the famous computer-aided translation software, Star Transit and TermStar. Many of our translators and employees can use the software to translate the big projects as our customs required. With the software our translation works have higher quality and productivity. Our rates are as follows: English-Chinese: US$0.045-0.05/English word; Chinese-English: US$0.065-0.08/English word; French-Chinese: US$0.055-0.06/French word; Chinese-French: US$0.065-0.08/French word; German-Chinese: US$0.055-0.06 per French word; Chinese-German: US$0.065-0.08 per French word; Japanese-Chinese: US$0.035-0.05 /Japanese Character; Chinese-Japanese: US$0.04-0.06 /Japanese Character; Japanese-Chinese: US$0.035-0.05/Japanese Character; Chinese-Japanese: US$0.04-0.06/Japanese Character; Russian-Chinese: US$0.03-0.035/Chinese Character; Chinese-Russian:US$0.04-0.045 /Chinese Character; Korean-Chinese:US$0.03-0.035/Chinese Character; Chinese-Korean:US$0.040-0.045/ Chinese Character. Best regards Dr. Zhen Wei General Manager of Beijing Huayi Translation Co.,Ltd. 602 of Building 1, 123 of Zhongguancun East Road Haidian Dis.Beijing China. Post code: 100086 Tel: 008610-62144551 62144542 Fax: 0086-10-62149508 E-mail: bjctn@163.com gukexinxiang@sohu.com If this mail has disturbed you, I will be very sorry. You can send me a letter to: translation18@sohu.com I will remove your e-mail from our list. I just love the reference to their "many copies of the famous computer-aided translation software." I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking myself, but it must not be very famous, as I have yet to see any paparazzi sneaking around the house! Link / Noodles / Trackback Sunday, October 19, 2003 Ouch! By Diana Hsieh @ 10:25 PM Life has really sucked lately. I mean: REALLY SUCKED. From the outside, everything is pretty much the same as usual. From the inside, pain and suffering abound -- thanks to a now ten-day migraine. Normally, I get migraines a few times a month for a few hours at a time. Aspirin and Excedrin usually work very well for me, even though they do sometimes create "rebound headaches," i.e. repeat headaches the next day. If those options fail, then I can turn to my prescription Maxalt. And if that fails, then usually a nap or a night of sleep will cure all ills. A few weeks ago, I started getting migraines while up in Boulder twice a week for class. That was unusual and bother, but not a huge problem. But then late last week, hell descended upon me. I got a migraine that just wouldn't go away. In its first few days, I was able to banish it for a few hours at a time with aspirin or Excedrin. But after a while, the pain was getting worse and the medicine less effective. One dark 4am, I woke up with the delightful feeling large spike through my skull. The Maxalt (which does not generate rebound headaches) was completely ineffective. In short, life sucked. On Friday, I saw my doctor. She recommended that I stay away from the aspirin and Excedrin, so as not to create more headaches later. Instead of the Maxalt, she gave me a new prescription for the migraines (Relpax), one supposed to cover a person for 24 hours better. She also put me on a low dose of beta-blockers in order to break the migraine cycle. (When I was an undergrad, I effectively controlled my excessive migraines with beta-blockers. They made me tired, but otherwise worked very well.) This all seemed like a reasonable course of action to me. Unfortunately, the Relpax has done nothing to curb the migraine pain, even in its maximum dosage. And the beta-blockers don't seem to be working yet. (I'm going to call my doctor tomorrow about increasing my dosage.) As a result, Saturday was a really miserable day; the migraine just ground into me all day long. The pain hasn't been quite as bad today, but I've had problems reading due to my aura. (An aura is the visual hallucination associated with a migraine. Mine tend to be a cross between strangely shifting shadows and very fine tv snow.) So now you know why my life has sucked of late. Um, thanks for listening. Okay, my migraine and I are going to bed now. Link / Noodles / Trackback More Word Jumbles By Diana Hsieh @ 12:15 PM In response to my previous post on word jumbles, Tibor Machan sent me this jumble: Almtiedtdy, the eniaimtoiln of tmtnrileeeakg furad and the piiibroothn asnaigt dipeevcte and aviubse tmtnieeeakg atcs or pcaiecrts are sfiacinngirt pilbuc ceornncs. I readily concede that I have no idea what it says. So what is the difference between this jumble and the ever-so-readable one? In the comments on my previous post, Tim pointed us to this excellent explanation by Matt Davis of the facts of the matter. Based upon his research into the subject, the author concludes that the brain can compensate for some jumbles, but is not as flexible as claimed in the original jumble: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Matt disputes that merely the placement first and last letters determine whether a word can be easily read or not by asking us to compare these three sentences: 1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir 2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs 3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur Matt then comments: All three sentences were randomised according to the "rules" described in the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more difficult to read. If you get stuck, the sentences are linked to the original unscrambled texts. Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words. Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like "salt" and "slat"? So what really determines the readability of jumbled words? Using the sentence "The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm" as his example, Matt suggests these criteria: 1) Short words are easy - 2 or 3 letter words don't change at all. The only change that is possible in a 4 letter words is to swap the order of the middle letters which doesn't cause too much difficulty (see 4). 2) Function words (the, be, and, you etc.) stay the same - mostly because they are short words, see (1). This really helps the reader by preserving the grammatical structure of the original, helping you to work out what word is likely to come next. This is especially crucial for reading jumbled text - words that are predictable are going to be easier to read in this situation. 3) Of the 15 words in this sentence, there are 8 that are still in the correct order. However, as a reader you might not notice this since many of the words that remain intact are function words, which readers don't tend to notice when reading. For instance, when people are asked to detect individual letters in a sentence, they are more likely to miss letters in function words. 4) Transpositions of adjacent letters (e.g. porbelm for problem) are easier to read than more distant transpositions (e.g. pborlem). We know from research in which people read words presented very briefly on a computer screen that the exterior letters of words are easier to detect than middle letters - confirming one of the ideas present in the meme. We also know that position information for letters in the middle of words is more difficult to detect and that those errors that are made tend to be transpositions. One explanation of this property of the reading system is that it results from the fact that the position of an exterior letter is less easily confused with adjacent letters. There is only direction in which an exterior letter can move, and there are fewer adjacent letters to 'mask' an exterior letter. Both of these properties emerge very naturally from a neural network model in which letters are identified at different positions in an artifical retina. The account proposed by Richard Shillcock and colleagues, also suggests another mechanism that could be at work in the meme. They propose a model of word recognition in which each word is split in half since the information at the retina is split between the two hemispheres of the brain when we read. In some of the simulations of their model, Richard Shillcock simulates the effect of jumbling letters in each half of the word. It seems that keeping letters in the appropriate half of the word, reduces the difficulty of reading jumbled text. This approach was used in generating example (1) above, but not for (2) or (3). 5) None of the words that have reordered letters create another word (wouthit vs witohut). We know from existing work, that words that can be confused by swapping interior letters (e.g. salt and slat) are more difficult to read. To make an easy to read jumbled word you should therefore avoid making other words. 6) Transpositions were used that preserve the sound of the original word (e.g. toatl vs ttaol for total). This will assist in reading, since we often attend to the sound of the words even when reading for meaning: 7) The text is reasonably predictable. For instance, given the first few words of the sentence, you can guess what words are coming next (even with very little information from the letters in the word). We know that context plays an important role in understanding speech that is distorted or presented in noise, the same is probably true for written text that has been jumbled. Link / Noodles / Trackback

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