Today it was time to do the last presentation for my Academic Presentations course. I was talking about blogs in general in my very first presentation and discussed system selection and article publishing with WordPress in the second one. This time, I used the chance to speak about blogs one more time and concentrated on the reader’s perspective. And this includes of course RSS.

Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don’t get it until you do it.
(George Siemens)

Well, I tried it anyway…

We had about 9 minutes for our speech and I didn’t really manage to make a sensible content selection. Ergo, I spoke reeeeeeally fast, which is definitely not the best idea when it comes to presenting “new” techniques. I hope that my audience understood the main principles of RSS & feeds anyway: They help you to keep track of fast-changing information sources.

There are tons of useful documents about RSS & feeds out there, but maybe you are interested in my PowerPoint slides.

I closed my presentation with a (slightly changed) quotation from Bicyclemark’s talk in HUMlab last week:

There is a problem in the world: There are people who know about RSS and there are people who don’t and are scared. I don’t know how we’re gonna come together.
(Bicylemark)

Hey Mark, feel honoured! You were officially quoted in an “academic” presentation!

Once again, my speech was videotaped (for evaluation purposes only ) and I’m really looking forward to watching it. Another comedy show with 2meter3…

The course is over now and it’s time to thank our teacher Van Leavenworth for doing such a great job. I had a good time in class and appreciated your enthusiastic and straight-forward way of teaching. Thanks for your feedback!

Well, I don’t really know where to start this time… I have already mentioned HumLAB and Podcasting in my blog, but maybe it’s good to explain these terms in short:

HumLAB is in fact a nicely equipped computer lab at Umea University (under the library, opposite to that hopelessly crowded lab with the old and crappy PCs). HumLAB describes itself as “a vibrant and diverse meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology”. They host a series of seminars and speeches covering all topics at the interface between IT & society. I think they have a really good reputation in the “scene”. Unfortunately, I have never been to HumLAB before, but I regularly check their English blog.

Podcasting refers to a relatively young fashion of producing and distributing (mostly non-professional) audio shows on the net. Google defines Podcasting as “making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user’s convenience”. Podcasting is often seen as an alternative to commercial radio. Read more about Podcasting at Wikipedia.

And now it’s time to combine these two things: Today, HumLAB presented a seminar with Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, who’s running a popular blog and podcast called Bicyclemark’s Communiqué. He is one of the pioneers of podcasting. Mark describes himself as a “Portuguese-American, radical, activist-journalist, pretend-academic, university employee, podcaster, blog fanatic”. And today’s topic was of course podcasting.

After giving a general overview about the topic, he became more personal and detailed. He presented some of his favorite podcasts, showed iPodder Lemon on his new iBook and reflected on the future of podcasting. It was really fascinating to realize that the podcasting scene is still such a small and connected group: I knew almost every European podcast he mentioned. And he already knew about the Loudblog project of Gerrit van Aaken (one of the most popular German podcasters), which was launched just 10 days ago.

The seminar was live-streamed and archived; a seminar chat was set up as well. The audience seemed to be familiar with the world of blogging (most people knew RSS), but I can’t assess their interest in podcasting. I think that some questions showed the continuous uncertainty of classifying podcasts into the world of media. Podcasts are asynchronous, podcasts are underground, and podcasts are subscriptions. Podcasting claims to be easy for both the producer and the listener. Podcasting is not about sophisticated content tagging or 24/7 broadcasting. Not yet.

After his presentation, I seized the chance to talk to Mark personally. He is really excited about the development of podcasting in 2005.
Bicyclemark, it was a pleasure meeting you! I’m looking forward to hearing your “Soundseeing” in Stockholm and the next German Phrase of the Week!

More resources:

• Seminar information in the HumLAB blog
• Mark about his talk
• Mark about Sweden
• Jim with a short review
• Stephanie shot a pic

YOU: Hey Eliza, what’s 45 and 5?
ELIZA: The sum of 45 and 5 is 50.
YOU: And what is the product of 3 and 4?
ELIZA: The product of 3 and 4 is 12.
YOU: Now: What is 2344355 divided by 0???
ELIZA: Well, 2344355 divided by 0 is not defined.

For my current course Speech and Language Processing we are supposed to submit 7 questions over time. For the second task, I decided to implement an ELIZA-like program.

ELIZA is a famous 1966 computer program by Joseph Weizenbaum, which parodied a Rogerian therapist, largely by rephrasing many of the patient’s statements as questions and posing them to the patient. Thus, for example, the response to “My head hurts” might be “Why do you say your head hurts?” The response to “My mother hates me” might be “Who else in your family hates you?”
[…]
Eliza worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people’s tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there.
(Wikipedia)

As the program’s domain I chose simple calculations with 2 operands. You can ask questions written in normal English (well, phases that I call English ). The text at the very beginning shows an example output of the program. calcELIZAr heavily uses Regular Expressions to recognize and transform inputs. It’s written in simple JavaScript and is therefore directly available on the web:

You can test calcELIZAr at http://www.2meter3.de/calcelizar/. It’s far away from being bug-free and speaking proper English, but it’s a nice toy, though. calcELIZAr is just a little project for school, but feel free to report flaws and errors.

Exactly 10 days ago started my new course called Speech and Language Processing. It’s offered by the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts (wow, I like this official translation of Humanistisk fakultet). I was really curious about the course. I have never dealt with linguistics in detail, but I’m actually really interested in this stuff. Some people know that I’m a big fan of projects like Zwiebelfisch or Deppenapostroph or Deppenleerzeichen (which fight against absurdities in the German language).

Whatever, the course is held by Kirk Sullivan (UK), and he makes a good job. It is definitely one of the most interesting courses I’ve ever had in my university life. You learn a lot about the system of languages (syntax, semantics, pragmatics …) and Kirk enriches the theory with a bunch of examples in English, Swedish and German (I’m even allowed to hand in my assignments in German, but I think I won’t). Sometimes it feels a little bit unstructured and confusing, but hey – I do not need to have perfect notes since there is no final exam!

As expected, the topic is closely connected to computer science. Some students are linguists; some others come from the more technical domain. It’s nice to see that also humanists are allowed to deal with regular expressions, finite state automata and other concepts of information technology. The combination of language and computers is really of interest to me. I’m looking forward to learning more about that stuff.

BTW: I passed both Analysis of Financial Data and Svenska Steg 3.

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.
Traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast.

Yesterday I wrote the final exam in Analysis of Financial Data. The course confirmed my uncertainty about statistics. Some topics seemed really obvious and straightforward, while others failed to enlighten my mind. Anyway, the course offered a good opportunity to refresh and extend my statistical knowledge in general and my SPSS skills in particular. Who knows, maybe I need that stuff later on. Did you know that log returns have better statistical properties than normal close prices?

But actually I wanted to write about the exams here in Umea in general. I just realised that I have never been pressed for time here. In Germany it is quite normal that you have to work extremely fast to meet the deadline. This can of course affect the quality of your answers, but on the other hand you are forced to fulfil tasks in a given time – the way you have to work in the real world… Sweden’s attitude towards time seems to be a bit different (no, I won’t write about permanent Fikas here). I still don’t know if I should call it equal opportunities or rather naivety…

• Yesterday’s exam: 5 hours – I went home after 2.
• Swedish language exams: 3 hours, you normally don’t even need half of them.
• Some last term’s exams: Work as long as you want!

Something really cool about exams in Umea is Östra Paviljongen: A whole building just for the exams! Separate toilets for each room, a “glassy box” for smokers, single tables for every student. Der Kommissar published an excellent photo story about that topic last semester. Still worth reading!

BTW: There are some rumours about the introducing quotation of this post. Wanna read about Winston Churchill and the Nazis?

Did you visit Umeå universitetet web page during the last days? Maybe you recognized some well-known people: On behalf of the university, a photo shooting with some international students was carried out last semester. And right now you can gaze at a nice eye-catcher for today’s information day on the university’s home page. I didn’t expect that Kees, Matthieu, Nils and co. become famous so fast…

More pictures of the shooting are used in the current utbildningskatalogen (education catalogue) which can be ordered online. It’s for free and maybe it’s a nice souvenir for you.

(Partly) via: Nils (who did – as always – this nice picture of the catalogue above)

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m currently performing my second presentation in Academic Presentations. As I did in the first presentation, I decided to give a deeper insight into blogs. This time I focus on software selection and article publishing using WordPress.

To demonstrate this process, I publish this post during my presentation! Hopefully everything works…

As already announced, I can now proudly present the pictures of yesterday’s event Experience Winter Campus.

Watch out the gallery! Many thanks to Kathi and Daniel for additional pictures.

This year, Umea University celebrates its 40th anniversary with a number of activities. Today’s event was called Experience Winter Campus and was primarily set up for the students (who should always be the most important people at universities).

The sun was shining, a band was playing, and Hot Dogs were served. And of course you could try these typical Nordic outdoor activities like dog sledge, snow cross and snow mobile. Wow! These scooters have enormous power! Although there was only a short circuit to drive, I had a lot of fun. And it proves that queuing up in the cold is not always “an extremely weird form of fetish”.

The beautiful weather and surrounding gave the opportunity to do some nice pictures. I will upload a gallery within the next days.

In connection to the 40th anniversary, the university has produced a movie which can be seen online (English versions: high quality | low quality). It’s designed in the style of the official Umea presentation, so some of you might feel familiar with it. And of course you can also find an according festschrift (yes, Germans, it’s true!).

Today, my new course started. It is offered by the Statistics Department and deals with tools to analyse and forecast huge amounts of numerical data in financial contexts. The course is held by a Swiss (der sich gleich in schwedisch-schweizerischer Entschleunigung übte [sorry, German side note]).
Up to now, I can’t really assess this course, but I think that the practical approach with several SPSS-labs is a good choice. Hopefully it’s not getting too tricky…

Today I had my first presentation in Academic Presentations. We had a 3 minutes time frame to talk about a topic of our own choice. All presentations were videotaped and we have to write a short evaluation about ourselves. I think I will find a thousand things to improve.

These first presentations were held in an informal setting and we should talk about a topic we are familiar with. I decided to discuss blogs! The most challenging task was to shorten the collected material to 3 minutes. You could speak hours about sociological, technical or even political effects, and 3 minutes are just good enough to give an introduction. Finally I made a presentation which did not even contain the words feed, page rank, blogosphere or trackback. Very strange.

It was quite interesting to listen to the other presentations. We heard about the wish to stop smoking, the correlation between bus speed limits and side winds, growing baby orchids, “feelings” of lobsters, girls in engineering study programs, Chinese medicine, and the experience to see snow for the first time.

BTW: In my research I found out that HUMlab at Umea University launched an interesting blog in January. I still remember Karsten talking about the BlogWalk 5.0 hosted by HUMlab last November. Greetings to Ireland!

Today my new English course called Academic Presentations started. During the course, we have to do three presentations which will be videotaped and analysed. The group is very mixed: International students, PhD students, university staff and even lecturers. I think this will be an interesting experience.

Besides university :

• Hendrik’s birthday with big pizza-session on Tuesday
• Kathi’s birthday with new insights into “Austrian” language on Wednesday
• Beach volley with my incredible mentor group today

In only seven hours I’m on the way up north, beyond the polar circle. Our weekend trip will show us the ancient Sami Market in Jokkmokk, the endless wilderness of Lappland and the world’s famous Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi. We will spend the nights in Gällivare and Kiruna. Be curious about the travelogue!

Have a nice weekend!

Wow, I really did it! I got up at half past seven yesterday. I still can’t believe. I wanted to visit a course I am not even registered for. But it was worth it: Image Analysis is a C-level course which seems to be challenging, maybe too challenging when you do not plan to read the book or deal with the assignments. Because of some scheduling conflicts I won’t write the exam anyway.

Later on I was shopping downtown and I didn’t know that it is such a sunny weather right now. Maybe I should get up before lunch more often. I bought “överdragsbyxa” and accidentally visited Systemet as well…

Back at university I picked up two old exams. When I came back to my bike I had to realise that I have a flat tire again. Damn! Seems to be a never ending story. Fortunately I still have Karsten’s bike.

Back at home I received some good news: There will probably be another bus for the trip to St. Petersburg. Jättebra!

In the evening we had a very nice mentor group dinner at Anders’ place. Everybody brought some more or less typical food from his/her home country. Vad läcker! I think that we are a “motivated” group now and that we will have a lot of fun together. The evening was completed in NH.