Archive for April, 2005

GRE Test Prep: A Peculiar Masochistic Exercise

“Mike spent 25 hours studying for the GRE, then walked out of the test feeling like a failure, and canceled his scores. If he increases his study hours by 20% preparing to take the test a second time, what is the likelihood that he will jump out of a window before the test date arrives?”

If I see another question like “How many prime numbers are there between 1 and 500?,” I will jump out of a window. Who the hell cares? That’s a Trivial Pursuit question, not a math question.

I must admit, however, there is a kind of sick fascination in studying for the GRE. It’s kind of like picking a scab. In the abstract, it’s not something you’d want to do, and you certainly wouldn’t recommend it to others, but when that damn scab is there, you can’t leave it alone. I’m actually interested in some of the math I’m (re-)learning - stuff that held no interest for me when I was first exposed to it in high school. But I’m sure I will forget it all as soon as the test is over.

I’m getting help from some of my co-workers, and it’s interesting to see how different minds work: with me, once I learn a word, I never forget it, even if I don’t use it. My writing and my vocabulary keep improving with time. But teach me a math formula, I’ll forget it in about 4 minutes unless I keep using it and reinforcing it in my mind. With many of my co-workers, it’s just the opposite: their minds have held on to all that high school math. How someone can simply remember the formula for, say, calculating the volume of a cylinder - even if they haven’t used it in 15 years - is beyond me. But with many of them, their writing probably isn’t any better now than when they left high school or college. I guess the first clue I had that I wasn’t like most programmers was that I actually like writing documentation for my code!

Abusing the English Language for Fun and Profit

These both me laugh:

Gizoogle: a translation service that shows your pages in a, uh, particular dialect of English. Here’s a translation of my post on Pat and Terry’s wedding to give you an idea.

At the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum, there’s SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator: computer science papers written in “context free” grammar. The creators actually got one of their nonsense papers accepted at conference. Their Rooter (PDF) paper is a good example.

Blog Slowdown

I probably won’t post much between now and May 12, which is when I take the GRE again. I’ve started studying with my new book (it’s the Barron’s book), which I’m happy to report is much better than the book I used last time. I particularly like it because it offers some clever strategies on how to guess at answers to math questions when you find yourself unable to mathematically determine the correct answer.

Also, the drywall guys are finally starting today - they’re a week late, which is annoying, but the way a lot of contractors are, I guess I’m lucky they’re showing up at all. In the evenings, after they’re done each day, I’ll be patching various plaster cracks (I just learned about plaster washers - very cool!). My goal is to finish doing that at the same time they finish - that way all the messy sanding, etc. will be done with. Between that and my GREing studying, I won’t have much time left for blogging :-(.

Finally…Easter Pictures

I’m finally posting the pictures from Maria and Kai’s trip to Denver for Easter. They’re going to visit again next month. Maria’s father is not in good health, so Maria’s visiting with Kai as often as they can. As you can see in the pictures, Kai had a great time. The captions tell the stories…

The Home Improvement Slide Show

As promised, here are the home improvement pictures. You’ve seen some of these in previous posts, but most of them are new. The pictures cover the work I’ve been doing since November. I’ve been busy the past few days doing some last-minute stuff and putting plastic and old blankets on the floor, so the drywall guys don’t trash my floors. They’re supposed to start today! That makes this both a good and bad time: good because we’re getting that much closer to the end, and bad because now we’re really pressed for space. Most of the 1st floor has become storage space for everything that was on the 3rd floor, and since I removed the closets at the end of the hallway, our current bedrooms have no closets. Maria and I are moving to the 3rd floor and its new closet when this is done. And the other 3rd floor bedroom is for Baby X (we offered it to Kai, but he wants to stay in his current room - we’ll get him a free-standing Ikea closet unit to replace his lost closet).

There are extensive captions explaining what’s going on in each picture. Note that I’ve organized these pictures into 3 different albums (one for each floor of the house), so when you reach the last photo for a floor, the forward arrow won’t do anything, since it’s the end of the album. You need to jump back here or go to the House Projects main page and switch to the next album.

Blast from the Past: Pat and Terry’s Wedding

I was just importing some baby pictures of Kai into Coppermine, and came across a couple photos from Pat and Terry’s wedding in 2001. Aside from my own wedding, it was the best wedding I’ve attended. They did what’s important at a wedding: they kept it relaxed and made sure everyone had a good time. And it didn’t hurt that they picked a beautiful spot near Tahoe.

I’ve got some more photos coming up (home improvement pics and Easter Kai pics) but I’ve been working overtime on the house this past week, so I haven’t had a chance to get them posted (the drywall guys are coming in a few days, so I’m wrapping up all my inside-the-walls stuff).

Baby X: The Name Game

Picking Kai’s name was easy. I think it was the 3rd name Maria’s folks suggested, and Maria and I both really liked it. But with Baby X, we’re having a harder time coming up with a name.

Last week I talked about Gen as a possible first name. The Japanese character for it has a special meaning in Maria’s family, but I have to admit I’m not excited about how the name sounds. So we’re considering other possibilities. We’re sticking with the idea of a Japanese first name, and we’ve got a few basic tests a name must past in order to be a candidate:

1. It has to pass the playground test - i.e. it can’t be a name that other kids will tease him for. So names like Waki and You are definitely out.
2. It has to sound good with Toppa. A couple of common endings for boys’ names are ~taka and ~tomo. Names with those endings are out. The alliteration with Toppa is just too strong.
3. It can’t be a mouthful. That is, it has to be easily understood by a Western ear. Since he’ll be growing up in the US, I don’t want him to have a name he’ll have to repeat 3 times to people when he introduces himself. So long or hard to pronounce names like Sakutarou or Natsuhisa are out. Possible exceptions are names that have a short nickname: for example, Yasuhiro can be just Yasu.

Maria and I have both been really busy this week, so we haven’t had much time to talk it over. She has a Japanese baby name book, but since it’s in Japanese, I can’t read it. But I found a web page with Japanese boys’ names in Romanji, so I can read them. I just looked through all of them and came up with a list of candidates. I don’t necessarily really like all these names, but they pass the three tests and they sound at least ok to me.

* Maria’s father is Shigenori, and her grandfather was Shigeo, so any name starting with Shige gets special consideration (in Japan, it’s ok to re-use part of a family name, but re-using the entire name is considered bad luck) .

If you see anything you like on the list, let me know, and we’ll give it closer look.

Article for PHP Architect

Remember that long post on UTF-8 from a few weeks ago - the one that gave you a sudden urge to take nap? I ran it by the editors of PHP Architect, and they’ve commissioned an article. I’m in the process of pumping it up to the required 4,000 words. I’ll be sending it off to them in a couple days. Commissioning the article only obliges them to pay me a small (very small) sum for it - it doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily publish it. But hopefully they will! I’ll let you know as soon as I find out - probably in a few weeks.

Blew It

After all my preparation, I blew the GRE :-(. I knew while I was taking it that I blew it, so I canceled out of the test. That means the score won’t be recorded, so I can try it again later. There are three sections to the test: essays, verbal, and math. It’s probably not a shock to hear me say I wasn’t worried about the verbal and essay sections. So I spent a few weeks studying for the math section. In the last half dozen practice tests I took, I was scoring between 640 - 690 (10-14 wrong out 60), which is slightly better than I did when I first took the test in 1992, so I was happy with that. But I made two fatal mistakes that led to disaster in the end:

1. I was practicing with a GRE prep book that was several years old (a co-worker loaned it to me). It turns out the verbal section of the test hasn’t changed at all since the book was published, but the math section has. It has fewer questions now, and more time, but the questions are harder. After paying ETS $105 for the privilege of taking the GRE, they sent me a “free” CD with a couple of practice tests in the new format. So on Friday I tried those: I scored a bit worse - 620 and 640 - but still felt good enough to proceed with the real test on Saturday.

2. Before leaving the house on Saturday morning, I went online to find out if I’d be better off guessing the answer for questions I couldn’t figure out, or if I should leave them blank. The GRE test tips site I found said I should always guess, which was fine with me. But then I came across something I didn’t know. While I knew the test questions were presented dynamically - you get harder questions if you’re doing well and easier questions if you’re doing badly - what I learned from this site was that the dynamic analysis ceases after the first 10 questions. At that point you’re on a “track” that you can’t get off. If you get stuck on the easy question track, there’s a fairly low ceiling established for your maximum score. The site recommended spending half the test time on the first 10 questions if necessary, so as to maximize your chances for getting on the track with the potential for the highest score. I took that advise, which turned out be an extraordinarily bad move. Because, in the end, whaddya know - there’s only 5 minutes left and I still have 10 questions to go! Brain freeze. Panic. A little more panic. Hit the panic button. Get out. Argh.

Don’t practice with an old, outdated book, and don’t change your strategy at the last minute with an approach you’ve never even tried before. Two things that seem awfully obvious now that I’m writing them down. It’s a good thing I’m not being evaluated on my test preparation techniques. At least I had the foresight to sign up for an April test - it leaves me enough time to take it again in May, so I can submit my scores before the June application deadline. I’m headed over to Amazon now to get a new test prep book!

Robots at the NEDO Expo

In a recent post I talked about Saya the receptionist robot and the implications for human employment in the service sector. She’s being featured at the current NEDO Expo in Aichi, Japan. Check out their Next-generation Robot Development page for pictures and descriptions of her, the childcare robot, the street-cleaning robot, the security guard robot, and more. In June they’ll have demonstrations of 65 different robots, which are organized into the following task areas (I’m not quite sure what these all mean - the accompanying PDF is in Japanese and I can’t read it - but this list should give you the basic idea).

• Network Robotics, RT Middleware (8)
• Robot for Interaction between Humans and Robots (7)
• Outdoor Robot for Skilled Work (8)
• Outdoor Robot for Special Environment Work (10)
• Medical Welfare Robot (10)
• Partner Robot (8)
• Performance Robot (5)
• Humanoid Robot (9)