I am a novice Soto Zen monk in the Matsuoka Lineage. In June 2014 I gave a talk at the Center For Spiritual Living titled Basic Goodness and the Opposite of Loneliness. The talk is a riff off of an exceptional article by Marina Keegan called The Opposite of Loneliness. Here is my talk:
I am a novitiate Zen Buddhist priest in the Matsuoka Lineage. Last summer, I gave a talk on Spiritual Practice at the Center for Spiritual Living in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The talk was about the role of practice in our lives.
There is a famous Zen saying “Do not confuse the finger for the moon” meaning do not confuse directions or descriptions for the direct experience. We might think or ourselves as spiritual if we attend a weekly spiritual service and if we read lots of spiritual books. These are just fingers, just pointers. The real key to a spiritual life is practice.
A 5 day Dual Sport trip from Las Cruces to the Four Corners area mostly on dirt roads.
Another look at the same trip:
I am a fan of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). These courses allow people everywhere (well, at least those with access to the Internet) to have access to courses taught by the top people in the field. For example, Peter Norvig, head of research at Google and the author of the top textbook on artificial intelligence, and Sebastian Thrun, a research professor at Stanford who lead the development of a robotic vehicle that won the DARPA challenge race to drive a 150 mile mountainous course, taught an free online course on artificial intelligence. 160,000 people in 190 countries enrolled in the course. This is a phenomenal shift in education. Students no longer need to be accepted to elite universities to have access to the highest quality instruction. I’ve used MOOCs in several of my courses ranging from introduction to computer science courses to upper level courses.
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My book, A Programmer’s Guide to Data Mining: The Ancient Art of the Numerati, is to be translated into Chinese and published by Posts and Telecommunications Press, the largest publisher of computer books in China. This Chinese version will be available in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. I am super excited about this opportunity to help more people learn about data mining. As always, the English version of the book is available for free at guidetodatamining.com. Also forthcoming is an English paperback edition for under $20. Now I just need to finish the revisions.
I am a Buddhist practitioner. On 15 July I presented the Sunday talk ‘My poodle and creating an enlightened society’ at the Religious Science church Center for Spiritual Living in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The talk was about bodhisattvas– beings who work tirelessly for the benefit of others.
For more information please see compassionatepath.org. I am always interested in talking with anyone about Buddhism and in practicing meditation with anyone. Feel free to contact me.
Jeanette Gundel presented a talk “Underspecification of cognitive status in reference production: the grammar-pragmatics interface” at the Workshop on Bridging the Gap between Computational, Empirical, and Theoretical Approaches to Reference at the Annual Cognitive Science Meeting in Boston. The talk was about our work on the Givenness Hierarchy. Continue reading
There are two common indices for scientific productivity: the h-index and the g-index. I have gone up in both these ratings. My h-index is now 13. This means that I have 13 articles each of which has been cited at least 13 times. The Wikipedia entry for the g-index says ” a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major research universities.” To put that number in perspective, Sebastian Thrun, a robotics professor at Stanford and developer of the Google Self-Driving Car, has an h-index of 95. So while I am very happy with my 13, it isn’t that great in the scheme of things. My g-index is now 39– I have 39 publications whose combined citations exceed 39 squared. My Erdõs number is 3.
If you are a student looking for a cool individual study project or are just interested in a project for its own sake, you might consider updating the existing resource, Cluster by Night. Cluster by Night (CnB) is a live CD approach to setting up an HPC (High Performance Computing) cluster for MPI work. (MPI is a programming library that allows you to write programs for computing clusters.) We’ve used CnB for the last several years in our operating systems class. What distinguishes CbN from other approaches (for example, the popular PelicanHPC) is that it can work with an existing network. With other approaches the master node on the cluster hands out IP addresses; with CbN the cluster nodes receive their IP addresses from the existing DHCP server. I think Cluster by Night is an awesome resource.
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Jeanette Gundel, Nancy Hedberg, and I finally got our paper, Underspecification of Cognitive Status in Reference Production: Some Empirical Predictions accepted to the journal, Topics In Cognitive Science, a journal of the Cognitive Science Society. It will be appearing in the special issue on “Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Computational and Empirical Approaches to Reference.” Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework we outlined in our 1993 paper, lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee. In this current paper we explore the role of underspecification of cognitive status in reference processing.We show how this framework accounts for a number of experimental results in the literature.