craigbaker's comments

Fingerspelling is just a path for borrowing individual words from English. It is not a part of native ASL vocabulary or grammar; that is to say, ASL does not consist of fingerspelled English sentences.

I looked into this a bit for classic Macs (8MHz 68000), and found that they didn't have the computing power to complete a handshake before the timeout was up. I could be wrong though, and maybe some faster implementation is possible...

SEEKING WORK | USA, Eastern timezone | remote only | part-time

Technologies: Python, NumPy, Torch, C++, Linux

I specialize in speech and audio processing, but I'm open to a wide variety of back-end work. I like short-term or intermittent jobs, but would also consider longer-term.

I started as a developer in 2005, bringing to production and then maintaining and documenting a distributed entity resolution system in C++ and Python. I started working with speech and audio in 2013, primarily working solo on my own Web application for foreign language pronunciation learning, which you can try at https://accentlab.net . This involved developing the full stack, from collecting and cleaning speech data, to training my own custom acoustic models for pronunciation analysis in Python with NumPy and Torch, to learning Flask, Django, Bootstrap and JavaScript for the web interface, to user testing.

For freelancing, I prefer jobs involving speech or audio processing, but I'm open to a wide variety of tasks, primarily backend. Jobs I've particularly enjoyed include: a quick bounty for rooting out synchronization bugs in a large multithreaded C++ codebase; developing custom audio processing modules with SciPy's filter library; creating a speech keyword-spotting module for a telephone assistant using a pre-trained Kaldi model; training a custom classifier for music synthesizer samples.

Other jobs I've done include using APIs for HubSpot, Zoho, AdSense, etc.; helping businesses with bulk generation of PDFs; developing a cross-platform TkInter application.

My Upwork profile https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01a1b1fe58b78de9cc is currently only visible to Upwork users due to lack of recent activity; my ratings are all 5-star and I can provide you with the reviews if you're interested.

Please get in touch via email, craig dot jb at gmail with some information about your project. Looking forward to hearing from you!

It is a common noun-forming suffix in Nahuatl. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tl

All the lentils from the supermarket that I've tried (and all legumes for that matter) have successfully sprouted: brown, pardina, black (beluga), and red. They're also good raw when sprouted, but not pardina, which I found ended up with occasional super-hard ones that hurt my teeth.

Some of the biomass is also washed away and becomes marine sediments, which can store a significant amount of carbon. https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...

Both keyboards do exist. The Cherokee layout is included in OSX and iOS, while Navajo is available for download. You can find pictures of Cherokee keycaps in use, and I think there were also typewriters and certainly printed type in Cherokee.

Try reading a good text multiple times, even to the point of memorizing it. Especially in the past, many cultures viewed memorization as essential to truly engaging with a text. Another way to engage more deeply with a good, classic text is to read commentary on it.

Obviously you can't treat everything you read this way, but for a few really good classics this has been a fruitful approach for me. For a novel, maybe you could just memorize a few passages. When you have the words rolling around in your head, you'll find that you recall them at just the right time.

Flour often contains eggs from insects like flour weevils, and if you let flour sit in the cupboard too long they'll hatch. But I would be disgusted to find 50 whole adult weevils per 5 lb. bag, on average. Maybe they're counting eggs?

Is this really speech recognition from raw waveforms? It looks like they're extracting MFCC features from the raw audio, and using that as input to the neural network. I thought that the point of WaveNet was that it took the raw waveform directly as input, unlike previous architectures which first extract spectral features such as MFCCs to use as the input.

I don't think the Confucius quote is real, but there are a few relevant ones:

"Not being angry at someone who doesn't know, isn't this a Gentleman?" 人不知而不愠，不亦君子乎？

"Ji Wenzi thought three times before acting. Confucius heard this, and said 'twice is enough'." 季文子三思而后行。子闻之曰：“再，斯可矣。”

In the specific context of his student Zi Zhang asking Confucius about how to get an official salary, he responded: "Hear much and put aside the points of which you stand in doubt, while you speak cautiously at the same time of the others:—then you will afford few occasions for blame. See much and put aside the things which seem perilous, while you are cautious at the same time in carrying the others into practice:—then you will have few occasions for repentance. When one gives few occasions for blame in his words, and few occasions for repentance in his conduct, he is in the way to get emolument." (tr. Legge)

Even after reading the paper, I'm not convinced of their hypothesis that the "phonological level of structure has not yet emerged", though the language surely sounds unusual and interesting. They concentrate on variation within words having the same meaning, rather than on differences in form between words with different meanings. They claim that no minimal pairs can be found; but how could there be no closeness in form between any words, when you have a rich vocabulary with words like "lemon" and "scorpion" as they mention? Some word pairs must be closer than others, and so how are they distinguished? Maybe the problem is that they only studied 150 words?

They note that "the three sign languages whose phonologies have been most extensively studied (ASL, ISL, and SLN—Sign Language of the Netherlands) all have minimal pairs distinguished by features belonging to these categories [hand configuration, location, and movement]," and these generalizations seem to shape much of their analysis. I know they have to start from somewhere, but is this the right way for non-native users to study a new language with a potentially unusual phonology? A sample of three well-studied languages, two of which are presumably very familiar to or native languages of the investigators, seems insufficient for generalizing about potential variation. What does the phonology of other "young" sign languages look like? Were any native ABSL users enlisted in searching for contrasting features and minimal pairs?

I'm still very curious about their question of how phonological structure arises in new languages. I don't doubt that ABSL's phonological structure may be increasing in complexity and regularity, but I'm not convinced that it has no phonology at all.

Sandler et al.'s paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250231/ referenced in the article clears things up. The title: "The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language". The abstract: The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time.