Bill Benzon – Lakoff’s Neural Theory with Notes
I'm really hoping to get into this this weekend. Bill Benzon at the Replicated Typo blog has posted a video of George Lakoff lecturing on his current neural theory of language. More than that, though, he's included some helpful notes beneath the video. Check out the video and notes at the link above.
Dec 3, 2013
Comments Off on Learning python with O’reilly school
Comments Off on Learning python with O’reilly school Learning python with O’reilly school
Over the last year, I’ve taken two courses in Python programming through the O’reilly School of Technology (yes, the same people that publish those programming books). I don’t think I’ve blogged too much about that experience.
Before going with O’reilly, I tried out Code Academy. That’s as good a jumping off point as I know of for anyone wanting to get their feet wet with computer programming, in general, or Python programming, in particular. I certainly learned a lot from working through some of their exercises. But … once I got to a certain level I started to feel like I was getting what I was paying for. The most difficult thing became working through an exercise and having a correct solution, and the interpreter not recognizing it as a correct solution. That’s what my co-workers taught me is called “wonky.” I always thought “janky” was the right word.
I don’t want to be too critical of Code Academy because they are really interesting, helpful things. But, eventually I got to a point where I felt like I wanted to do more than I was going to be able to learn there. I eventually decided on the O’reilly school for one primary reason – access to an instructor. Programming is certainly something that many people can learn from books, but having had a bit of experience with programming through Code Academy and wishing many times that I had someone I could talk through solutions with, I was convinced having an instructor would be good for me.
My experience with O’reilly was overwhelmingly positive. The lessons were maybe not as interactive as they could have been sometimes, but Kirby, my instructor, was top notch. And, I learned a whole lot of things that help me with my day to day work. Most of what I do programming-wise on a daily basis is read tab-delimited text files, edit data in a database, and try to work with already existing data in a database to try to spit out new and interesting things. The first of those tasks was directly covered in my classes and for the database tasks I learned the loops, if-statements, and logical statements to accomplish those things. In addition, I learned just a little bit about making graphical user interfaces, and I made two, in particular, that saved me a considerable amount of editing time in my work over the last year.
Depending on your stage in life, you might consider the courses cheap, reasonably priced or expensive. For me, I felt like they were reasonably priced, especially having a human being involved in the process. And, they are pretty frequently running 30% off promotions.
Overall, I would definitely recommend O’reilly school to anyone wanting to learn some programming (no I don’t get any kickback for that). I may end up taking the last two Python classes and getting the certification myself. If you have any questions about how it works, hit me up in the comments here or on social media.
Joel has forgotten two of Wesley’s most important blogging rules
- Blogging must be done on horseback
- With a strangely warmed heart
#boom
Okay … my response here probably indicates that I need to pay attention to what my friend Joel has to say. Check out his reflections on an “ethical framework” for blogging at the link below:
Wesley’s Rules for Blogging – Introduction | Unsettled Christianity.
Pieter Seuren’s scathing retrospective on Chomsky – part 1
For those interested in such things, be sure to check out Pieter Seuren's five part retrospective on Chomsky. The link above is to part 1. He ends part 5 with:"Does this man deserve a niche in the academic hall of fame? I doubt that very much. His thinking is certainly sharp, quick and broad in superficial extension, but it lacks depth, flexibility and above all vision. Nor is it really inquisitive, or at least it hasn’t been since the mid-sixties. From that period on, we see a man who digs in his intellectual heels and defends his fort, warding off ideas that might widen his perspective or make him look at things from a different, perhaps more promising, angle. We see a man who, having made a very promising start, rapidly began to abuse the enormous amount of social power he had acquired, eliminating dissidents while putting up an innocent face to the outside world. A man who professes high ideals of freedom and dignity in his political writings but practises the opposite in his academic activities. We see a compulsive prima donna, a clever manipulator of public opinion, a man who has consistently put his own person above the ideals that all unusually gifted persons occupying a leading position in any sphere of life have a special duty to pursue."
Be sure to also check out the comments as Seuren is not just an unbiased, objective observer in all of this, and some commenters interact with him.
John McWhorter’s New Teaching Company Course on Audible
John McWhorter has quickly become one of my favorite popularizers of research in modern linguistics. He is especially a pleasure to listen to. His new Teaching Company course Language A to Z is out on Audible. I haven't checked it out yet because I'm in the midst of listening to another course, but I can definitely recommend one of his other courses on Audible -- Myths, Lies and Half-truths of Language Usage. And, I plan on checking out Language A to Z in the near future. Check it out at the link above.Collocations, collocations, and collocations
In recent reading and listening to papers, I’ve noticed that sometimes the word “collocations” is used ambiguously. Authors seem to use the word in three different ways:
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1. Words that occur together
2. Words that occur together frequently
3. Words that occur together in some statistically significant manner
Of course, it’s unsurprising to see a word used in different senses. It’s only in this case that I’m not terribly interested in “collocations” in the first sense listed above.
At any rate, here’s how I try to disambiguate in discussions related to Biblical Hebrew. First, I assume that most people talking about collocations in the Hebrew Bible do not mean the third sense in the list above, unless they explicitly state otherwise. It is difficult to run statistical analysis on a closed corpus as small as the Hebrew Bible.
Second, I take an example of a collocation someone is talking about that I think might be rare and see how common it is. If it turns out to be rare, I assume they are using sense one above. If not, I assume they might be using sense two above, until I might come across something else they call a collocation I think might be rare.
Perhaps this isn’t helpful to anyone, but my first experience with the word “collocation” was in research related to vocabulary learning where it is often used in sense three above. So, I sometimes end up confused.