Things have become especially frustrating when dealing with two of their most under-baked utilities: Pages (whataretheyanyway?!) and Events (beentheresinceforeverandstilldon’twork) in order for my Page, Barefoot, to advertise its concert series.

Pages have confused people since their inception. They might be better titled Organisations. They are a bit like groups, but they have fans instead of members, and I think Facebook didn’t want them created quite so freely as groups are (were?). They’re also a bit like personal Profiles in that they have a wall and apps and everything, and they can be fans of other pages. And they’re publicly viewable (and crawlable) on the web, so they act as web sites, and can help bring in FB’s bread. Basically, they’re what groups should have been, but never were.

Events are very popular, but they’re impossible for something like a concert series. You can only state one start and end time, so people get confused by our concert being over 6 days long, or say they can’t come because they’re unavailable on the first evening.

In the intersection between Pages and Events is an abyss of madness. One of the neatest features Facebook ever added to Events was the ability to message groups of people, depending on whether they were attending, not replied, etc. But if you create the event through a Page, you can’t do that:

if an event is hosted by a Page, the Page admin will not see the option to send a message to event guests. Individuals may be added as event admins in order to have this option. (Facebook FAQ)

Oh, I just need to make myself an event admin! But I can’t because Page admins can’t be added as event admins if the Page hosts the events.

Yet, if I remove another Barefoot member from being a Page admin, I can add them as an Event admin. And indeed, then I can add them back as a Page admin.

So somehow, very dodgily, now a person is both a Page and Event admin and can (yay!) send messages to event guests.

Another frustration: after finally finding this hole in Facebook’s foolishness, I could no longer send to people who’ve replied Not Attending. I can understand that those not attending are probably not interested in hassle messages. But when people reply Not Attending because Facebook makes it seem like we only have one concert, not five, I’d like a way to send them a clarification…

End rant.

Of course (in my way of doing things), my idea was somewhat more ambitious. Which is why it never got done. I’d like to see:

• More annotation of the origin of lyrics and tunes
• Links between tunes which are applied to different prayers

Essentially this means that the tune and the words are separated, and each of them could be annotated with Hebrew, transcription, translation, authorship/variant notes… and somewhere in the intersection people would upload recordings. Maybe I can ask Mendy and Gabe to work on it. Or mabye it was just too much to ever make a site out of and they’ve got it right.

Either way, I’ll need to find some time to record some tunes. (Because most of their voices are terrible…)

I pity my markers.

And here it is, in case anyone cares: Learning Named Entity Recognition from Wikipedia.

And now, I am reborn. What to do with myself? So much to do with myself. But at least I have time to work it out… =)

I borrow the example text used in one reporting blog:

משטרת גרמניה עצרה שני צעירים בחשד שהתכוונו לבצע פיגוע במטוס של חברת התעופה ההולנדית קיי-אל-אם. כוחות משטרת גרמניה פשטו על המטוס שחנה בשדה התעופה בקלן, זמן קצר לפני שהמריא בחזרה להולנד והוציאו ממנו את שני הצעירים, אזרח גרמני יליד סומליה בן 24 ואזרח סומליה בן 23.

Google Translate says:

German police arrested two youths suspected Shaatcwano an attack on the plane of Dutch airline Kay – to – if. German police forces raided the plane parked at the airport Cologne, shortly before Smria Leclnde back and took him to the two young men, a German citizen born in Somalia 24 Uezarh Somalia age 23.

There are a number of interesting things here:

Assuming something is a proper name if it can’t otherwise be understood is quite a normal approach. But it’s unusual that Google has particular trouble with “שהתכוונו”, “שהמריא” and “ואזרח”, which I don’t consider particularly uncommon words. These, and the messed up “להולנד” all have the common feature of attached prefixes (proclitics), and Google gets it right for all but “המריא” when these are removed. Obviously their word segmentation systems could be improved, or could be adjusted so that if the end system resorts to considering it a proper noun, it might go back and check whether there were some proclitics it failed to lop off. In practice, implementing such a feedback loop may not be worthwhile if the system wants to be fast.

Go take a look at the proper names it forms. It puts some funny letters in there, transliterating:

• ה ([h]) as nothing (which a lot of Israelis do, but I’m guessing that the system is being hugely biased by the silent הs at the ends of many female names);
• ו ([v]) as “w”, maybe because “w” always translates to Hebrew in names as ו, but it makes Google look very academic (or Iraqi/Yemenite) to transliterate the vavs in words as waws.
• כ ([k]) becomes “c”, but so does some non-existant letter in להולנד! What’s going on there?
• ח (usu. [x]) becomes “h” (rather than “ch” or “kh”), but I guess it is only ever found when transliterating Arabic names, and Ahmed is more common than Achmed.
• The vowels are also interesting. Especially the spurious “e” on the end of להולנד, but it’s already clear that it’s done a strange job on that one.

Kay – to – if (KLM) is obviously entertaining, but there’s not really much to say about it (except that apparently they split tokens on hyphens).

The most interesting phrase translation is “and took him to the two young men” from “והוציאו ממנו את שני הצעירים”. It would appear as if they took the ו on the end of והוציאו as referring to the object (והוציאוֹ) rather than the subject (והוציאוּ), but seeing as the former is quite rare in contemporary written Hebrew, this may mean they have a wide variety of texts from various ages. And then ממנו seems to disappear altogether. So maybe I’ve just misinterpreted how the system makes a mistake. At the end of the day, the system is all numbers, so no one can really be certain how it made the mistake…

One of the few other online Hebrew-English translation services is Reverso:

A police of Germany stopped two young on suspicion that meant to execute an attack in the airplane of the Dutch airline KAY but them. Forces a police of Germany spreaded on the airplane that parked in the airfield Bkln, a short time before took Off back/in return to Holland and withdrew from him you two the young, German born citizen Somalia ben 24 and citizen Somalia ben23.

Comparing to this translation, we see that Reverso generally does a better job of splitting off proclitics and so makes less apparent mistakes. But its grammar is certainly much poorer, both in English and in Hebrew, thinking for instance that “צעירים” should be understood as an adjective rather than a noun; and that one makes an attack in a plane rather than on it; or that the singular משטרת should be translated “a police”; or that “את” is better translated “you” than as a direct-object marker. Compare also Google’s handling of the compound noun phrase “כוחות משטרת גרמניה” as “German police forces” rather than “Forces a police of Germany”. Also interesting is Reverso’s offering of a choice for בחזרה as “back/in return”.

Overall, while reverso handles word segmentation somewhat better, Google has a much more fluid grammar and chooses more appropriate words in translation.

I haven’t tried translating the other direction (English to Hebrew) yet, or any other combination of languages where I would be under-qualified. I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

And no, they don’t do Yiddish yet. Real Soon Now.

Yes, it’s been a long time. Yes, I won’t be talking much here till November. Shana tova anyway! Enjoy translating your New Year cards from strange Israeli rellies…

Tom Cruise → 1962 births → 1960s births → 20th century births → Births by year → People → Humans → Apes → Primates → Mammals → Vertebrates → Chordates → Animals → Eukaryotes → Organisms → Life → Core issues in ethics → Ethics → Branches of philosophy → Philosophy → Belief → Spirituality → Human behaviour → Behaviour → Branches of psychology → Psychology → Interdisciplinary fields → Academic disciplines → Academia → Education → Personal development → Personal life → Self → Metaphysics → Reality → Philosophical concepts → Philosophical terminology → Terminology → Vocabulary → Language → Communication → Social psychology → Social philosophy → Philosophical movements → Movements → Ideologies → Epistemology → Philosophy of science → Analytic philosophy → 20th century philosophy → 20th century → 2nd millenium → Millenia → Years → Chronology → Measurement → Scientific observation → Data collection → Data management → Computer data → Computer storage → Computer memory → Digital media → Digital technology → Electronics → Electromagnetism → Special relativity → Relativity → Theoretical physics → Theories → …

And yes, this isn’t completely irrelevant. It relates to my honours research work. It means that the Wikipedia category hierarchy is only useful as a folksonomy, or perhaps only for a very small hierarchical depth beneath each article…

Another way of identifying an entered string with one of many options is with regular expressions. As such, I have attempted below to devise regular expressions to match all expected spellings for each tractate (masechet, masekhet, maseches, meseches, etc.) of the Mishnah. Please note that this is only a draft: I expect to improve the regular expressions, and feedback is much appreciated.

Using this as a background study, it may be possible to automate the building of regular expressions for Hebrew words (with vowels given), although many of the expressions below also cover a number of irregularities that would be hard to incorporate into such a builder. Consequently, one could also build a list of all possible alternative spellings for a word, which could then be used with a search engine to make searches of these Hebrew words comprehensive. (Edit: the current expressions below overgenerate way too much and would probably be inappropriate for that task.)

For those without the technical background, the following features are used in the regular expressions below:

• [abcd] means any of a, b, c, or d.
• (ab|cd|ef) means any of ab, cd, or ef.
• ab?c means either abc or ac (i.e. b is optional).

For the purposes of this task, the expressions below may overgenerate. That is, they may match more than valid spellings of those words, but that is okay as long as they don’t overlap, i.e. match expressions that could also refer to another tractate. I also hope they don’t excessively undergenerate.

But Facebook groups (or other features) could do with the same versatility being available. Applications could make groups a powerful framework for tasks like:

• charting fundraising by or for the group
• publishing regular event times
• better-than-forum planning and discussion tools
• polls, voting or surveys
• rostering
• game tournaments
• friend wheels to show how group members are connected
• Countdowns, countups and counters (e.g. how many of my yeargroup have got married)
• hundreds of thousands of other things only other Facebook users could come up with.

There’s a good chance Zuckerberg and his team have thought of this already, but the privacy arrangements would have to be quite complicated: at the moment individual users consent to individual applications having access to their personal information. Just because a user is a member of a group with an app, that doesn’t mean they consent to the app knowing about them. Will users have to consent to a group’s apps when they join it, or each time the group admin adds another app? That’s potentially a lot of bureaucracy.

Basically, this could get messy. But the future tells of bright and endless possibilities.

I’ve always loved Opera for their extraordinary innovation, their focus on speed and agility and security, and just their ability to create a powerful and accessible tool. A tool I can use with (nearly) only keyboard, or (nearly) only mouse. A tool that innovated sessions and tabs and mouse gestures and Fast Forward and Speed Dial; a tool that doesn’t need extensions because it’s got it all. A tool not only focussed on the present desktop market, but working towards the future on the Wii, on your mobile, on your PDA, on screen-readers for the visually-impaired, or on the One Laptop Per Child project.

The upcoming version is exciting for a number of reasons:

1. The moment you open it, it feels fast. And the tests say it is fast. Even faster than its predecessors.
2. It promises a new long needed, wait-free email client backend. Although the current one is great for accessing things, it can slow down the browser at times once you’ve accumulated 1.5GB of email, like I have.
3. It brings with it new features I’ve been hoping for, like searching through page content history, and not making you save your password before you can see whether it worked.
4. It is implementing new technologies that will make the web of tomorrow. Now we’re just waiting for Internet Explorer to make an effort to catch up… Still waiting…

You can see Opera Watch for more…

If this is an alpha, what goodies should we hope for in the final version??!

So yeah, I’m a nerd. But I’m an excited nerd!

Nonetheless, I have for a long time wanted to know the relationships between my friends on Facebook. I.e., who of my friends know each other? More so, who is a common friend of a lot of my friends, but is not listed as my own?

The application that I saw on my friend Ariella’s page piqued my interest in analysis of the social network. That is the Friend Wheel. It plots on a circle the interconnections between one’s friends. Well, up to 400 of one’s friends, so it ?randomly excluded a few handfuls of mine when drawing the graph (sorry if that includes you!).

Annoyingly, it does not produce a very usable or analysable format, especially when your network of friends is large, but it does perform some clustering. So I decided to take the produced chart, and (unneatly) label some of the clusters I could identify… Have a look! Nothing too surprising, really, and more often the outliers—the ones that don’t get clustered in among others—are the interesting cases, and I haven’t made the effort to mark them.

(And if making this chart available is a privacy concern for some, please let me know.)

If this sounds like you, STOP.

Or at least check first to see if you can find evidence that what is said in the email is true. A lot of what you read online is fact; most is opinion. Some is true, some is false, some wavers between the two. Others may be true opinion but based on false backgrounds.

That was the case with an email I received today. Twice, from opposite sides of the world.

Entitled: Fwd: FW: Yom Hashoah or alternatively FW: Very important for everyone to know!

This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it “offended” the Moslem population which claims it never occurred. This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it. It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved andhumiliated with the German and Russia peoples looking the other way! Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be “a myth,” it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide! Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world. Please send this e-mail to 10 people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain. It will only take you a minute to pass this along – Thanks!

If I hadn’t already heard of this curriculum removal in major news sources, this email should be suspicious. It was not hard to Google its first two lines before replying to the person who sent it to me (and the person who sent it to them).

Thanks, but the premise of the email is false.

What happened:

According to a study, “Teachers are dropping controversial subjects such as the Holocaust and the Crusades from history lessons because they do not want to cause offence to children from certain races or religions, a report claims. A lack of factual knowledge among some teachers, particularly in primary schools, is also leading to “shallow” lessons on emotive and difficult subjects, according to the study by the Historical Association.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article1600686.ece

What your email reported:
> This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum
> because it “offended” the Moslem population which claims it never
> occurred.

Not the same. The forwarded email is over-reacting (and xenophobic). Yes, the issue of English education may be noteworthy, but it does not necessarily relate to Muslims, and is not as serious as the email reports.

Besides, the email fails to distinguish the Holocaust and the Second World War and so makes some far-off claims. See the discussion of this email at: http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=14139&st=0&#entry200276

It is also important to be aware that these emails get edited along the way. Similar content is pulled together from different forwards, context is changed, countries are changed from US to Canada to Australia, and in this case, the second version I received had been neatened into paragraphs.

In many cases, the first place to check if you receive a possibly-bogus email is Snopes.com. But if that fails, do the research yourself, or just don’t pass it on.

PS: it seems Snopes does have an article on this email, which is much better than my response and goes into those components of the email that are true and those that are false in detail.

Thanks.