indessed roscivs

CNN posted an article today entitled, “Bloody Monday”—referring to the host of layoffs that major companies have been announcing due to the recent economic downturn.

The final week of January began with a bloodbath for the job market, as over 71,400 more cuts were announced on Monday alone.

At least six companies from manufacturing and service industries announced cost-cutting initiatives that included slashing thousands of jobs.

More than 200,000 job cuts have been announced so far this year, according to company reports. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost over 2008, the highest yearly job-loss total since 1945.

Back in October, people were comparing the stock market crash to that of the Great Depression—but it seems odd, given our perceptions of the events of that time period. Our lifestyles didn’t change much in the last three months—we didn’t have a lot of capital tied up in the stock market or the housing market, so when things dropped we were relatively unscathed. But even looking around, it doesn’t seem like the Great Depression at all. Was it really like this back in the ’30s? A graph of the stock market crashes over the past hundred years shows that the current recession is looking depressingly similar to that of 1929—it’s certainly worse than any crash since then. But it doesn’t feel like a Great Depression, does it?

Well, I decided to look up a Great Depression timeline of events. Perhaps the poverty and destruction of wealth we associate with the Great Depression didn’t happen immediately in the few months after the stock market crash, but took longer to manifest themselves? Perhaps this is what it was like three months after Black Tuesday—nobody really thought it would be a big deal, and weren’t directly affected by what happened initially. timeline says that, after a few months, not much had happened:
[T]he Federal Reserve has cut the prime interest rate from 6 to 4 percent. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon announces that the Fed will stand by as the market works itself out: “Liquidate labor, liquidate real estate … values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wreck from less-competent people”.

By the end of 1930 (the equivalent of our end of 2009), the GNP had fallen 9.4 percent from the previous year. The unemployment rate had climbed from 3.2 to 8.7 percent—nowhere near the 15-20% unemployment rate we typically associate with the Depression. (In comparison, in December 2008 the unemployment rate rose to 7.2 percent. I don’t know what it will be at the end of January, after the fallout of “Bloody Monday”.) I’m not sure what the GNP or unemployment rate will be at the end of this year, but I don’t see 1930-type levels as being unrealistic.

1932 and 1933 were the worst years of the Great Depression—the equivalent of our 2011 and 2012—with GNP falling 31 percent compare to 1929, and unemployment at 23.6 percent. Industrial stocks had lost 80 percent of their value since 1930. 40% of all banks that existed in 1929 had gone under.

What will our 2011 and 2012 look like? Obviously the market has some “adjusting” to do. Will it finish its adjustments by the end of this year, and be on its way back up soon? Or is this only the beginning, with 2009 looking positively sunny compared to what is yet to come?

President Obama (yes, it really is President Obama now) was inaugurated yesterday, and millions around the world were watching. But some were even watching from outer space:

http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/20/pictures-president-obamas-inauguration-as-seen-from-space/

I’ve been poking through the indessed logs recently, to see how many people visit this site, and why. One of the interesting things to look at is the list of Google queries that bring people here—I’m on the first page of Google hits for a surprising range of interesting terms.

While not on the first page of Google hits, one interesting search query that has brought people to indessed has been the word “shishkaberries”—an apparently uniquely Seattle-ish treat of overpriced fruit stuck on a shish-ka-bob stick.

So, in attempt to be helpful to all those Google visitors searching for information about Shishkaberries, here’s my Shishkaberry Roundup:

The New Awesome experienced Shishkaberries the same place I did—at Bumbershoot, the awesome music festival held at the Seattle Center every year. For a whole weekend, you get to lounge around in the rare Seattle sun, listening to all sorts of music—from rap to rock to folk and back again.

Meanwhile, The Stranger complains about Shishkaberries at the Seattle Mariners games—apparently the sign says “Shiskaberry’s”, not “Shishkaberries”, offending the apostrophe sensabilities of the poster, Anthony Hecht.

The WhySeattleSportsSuck blog has a different take on the Shishkaberry subject. Their beef is that for five strawberries, you have to shell out five smackers—that is to say, one buck per strawberry (ignoring the delicious chocolateyness topping them). The author asserts that “this is why we’re in an economic crisis—banks lending out money they don’t even have so customers can run around willy-nilly throwing stacks of money off of bridges and paying a dollar for a strawberry.” Overpriced fruit kabobs representing the fundamentals of our econoomy? They might be on to something …

Summer of Matt also posted in the sports groove, but in a more positive note. He lauded the surprising variety of food available at Safeco Field, which apparently goes beyond the usual hot dog and nacho fare present at your typical stadium. Apart from Shishkaberries (”the coolest/most unique thing [he'd] seen”), he also mentioned garlic fries, BBQ, sake, and sushi—including the “Ichiroll”, a spicy tuna sushi roll named after the Seattle star, Ichiro Suzuki.

All this talk of food is making me hungry. I think I’ll go fix myself a snack.

This comparison also reveals a difference between the positivist and interpretive, or hermeneutic approach to the interpretation of myths. Positivists read myths literally and find them false and foolish; interpretivists read them metaphorically or allegorically and find them true and profound.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

—Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

I finally managed one critical simplification that enabled me to complete the database model. Today, I released a new version of my kanji quiz program that used a database instead of flat files, resulting in a huge speed improvement and increased flexibility.

So, what was my simplification? Avoiding radicals altogether.

Well, okay, I didn’t go quite that far. What I did was ignored any kanji composition information that didn’t consist only of other kanji. So the kanji for “time” still shows, when you run the program, that it’s made up of “sun” and “temple”. But anything with the “grass radical” doesn’t have composition information any more.

An unfortunate simplification, to be sure, but one that I think was necessary for me to get a release finished in any reasonable time period. In the near future, I hope to revisit that decision and figure out some way of enabling non-kanji radical information to be present and displayed. First, though, I think I’ll write a tool that allows editing and revising of that information—already I’ve noticed some inaccuracies in the current kanji-only data that I have.

To make up for this reduction in information, however, I’ve added a new feature: kanji compound words. Now, when viewing kanji information, you can click a button and get a list of all “edict” words that contain that particular kanji. This really helps memorization—more so, I think, even than the radical information.

For example, the word for photograph—”sha-shi-n”—is made up of two characters that I didn’t know before. The characters themselves are not used very often in isolation, so it’s difficult to remember their basic meaning. But when I remember that they’re part of “photograph”, I easily recall the readings and a basic idea of what each means.

So, what’s next on my plate? Enabling the user to select different kanji lists, rather than being stuck on the two hard-coded JLPT lists. Maybe after that I’ll get bored and move on to the next project …

In my last post, I talked about the composition of Japanese kanji characters, and how it’s been giving me difficulties as I try to create a good database model for my kanji quiz program.

Probably the biggest problem is that not every sub-character is a complete kanji character. The four I mentioned above—sun, temple, earth, and inch—are all kanji characters that can be found alone quite commonly. However, the grass radical (which can be found in kanji such as “tea”, “flower”, and of course “grass”) is not a kanji character itself. You’ll never see it on its own—there’s no Unicode character for it—and there’s not even a standard way of referring to it. One source might call it “ku-sa-n-mu-ri”, while another calls it “Bushu 140, Variant 2″ while yet another refers to it simply as “Element #1783″. How should my database refer to it? Should I give it yet another arbitrary number, or should I use one of the names somebody else uses?

Another problem is that, of these many sources I’ve looked at, none are complete. In fact, most of them are not only woefully incomplete, but in some cases simply wrong. So I not only have to deal with incomplete data, but I also have to deal with incorrect data, and ensure that whatever format I use in my own database, it’s easy to change or update when I come across incorrect data that I imported from elsewhere.

So, after puzzling through this problem all weekend, and attempting to drastically simplify all my assumptions and use cases so I could cut this down to something manageable—even if it had to be reworked significantly later—I find myself no closer to my final goal of having a working database for my kanji quiz program. I’ve caught myself going down numerous dead ends, realizing the flaws in my implementation or data model, then heading down another path that failed for different reasons. I keep trying to carve off pieces of the headache-inducing problem, trying to get down to a smaller and smaller piece until I’ve finally got something small enough to chew, but I still end up with something too large for me to reasonably tackle on my own.

I feel like I’m getting closer—every so often I can catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel—but then I crash into a wall I had forgotten about or a new wall I hadn’t yet encountered, and I wonder exactly how far away I really am.

My Tsumego quiz program got a lot of action last week! Many people tried it out, and a dozen or so people gave comments. One person even emailed me directly, asking for a particular feature. So, time to stop working on the Japanese quiz program and get back to work on the Tsumego quiz program, right?

Well, not quite. First of all, this week somebody also emailed me about the Japanese quiz program, suggesting some improvements to it. But more to the point, these programs are my hobbies that I work on in my spare time, so I work on what I feel like working on, not necessarily what people are clamoring for! And I wanted to work on the Japanese program.

Last week, I mentioned that I’d done the final bit of refactoring to abstract out the nasty flat-file system so it could be more easily changed to be backed by a database. So, this weekend, I really wanted to get the database schema sorted out, and a solid plan for how things should look in the new, faster, easier-to-maintain world. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Once again, I ran into the problem of how to model the kanji radicals.

As I’ve mentioned before, each kanji character in Japanese can be broken up into smaller pieces. For example, the kanji for “time” is made up of two smaller characters, one for “sun” and one for “temple”. The kanji for “temple” is also made up of two smaller characters, one for “earth” and one for “inch”. Native Japanese speakers don’t typically think of these sub-characters any more than we think of the etymologies of the words we use, but they can be very useful for non-native speakers to use as mnemonics for both meaning and for stroke order.

Unfortunately, there are significant complexities when it comes to modelling this data in a programmatic way. I’ll talk more about these nasties in my next post.

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr. Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr. Putin declared.

Mr. Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?”—he asked. “Why not?” Mr. Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr. Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes, but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr. Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah—you have scored a point there.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5147422.ece