Brownian thought space

Cognitive science, mostly, but more a sometimes structured random walk about things.

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Location: Rochester, United States

Chronically curious モ..

Friday, August 31, 2007

Arrival of the baingangaadi

The eggplant car is here :)

Sunday, August 19, 2007

ltnblogging

A whole bunch of new experiments and ideas coming along!
Lets see... finally I've gotten some ideas for experimental evidence to show that statistical computations over the incoming speech must be sensitive to some notion of what natural language looks like. So, forthcoming is an experiment that tests the very distinctly Saussurean idea that in language, what counts is a contrast. So, if you look at a dog and say 'bog', either (a) 'Bog' refers to some feature of the animal other than its kind (in this example), e.g. it might be the name of the particular dog. Or, (b), the [d] and the [b] sounds actually map onto the same underlying lexical item dog, so that these two sounds are not contrastive in the language (are not phonemes of the language). Without providing fodder to the competition, I'll just say - computational models, watch out! :)


Oh,and I finally got around to restarting baking things, starting with strawberry-banana muffins, using a recipe from this nice website. The final product is edible, and quite tasty too ;)

















And here is my neighbour's handsome cat. An erstwhile run- away- from- neighbours er, he's now keen on playing and sometimes rather adamant about it...