Consider the word sanction it can mean to approve of an action or to disapprove of an action. Same word, two completely opposite semantic usages. These words are known as contronyms. Other examples are: cleave, dust, boned, oversight. In computational linguistics, these are interesting because they have at least two very distinct senses. As I work on developing automated systems for taking natural language descriptions of concepts and subdividing them into sense clusters, I've become increasingly interested in contronyms and, to a lesser extent, homonyms. Words like these should generate sense clusters that are very far from each other in semantic space and hence clearly demonstrate the performance of various clustering algorithms. The problem with this idea is there are few, if any, studies with real live actual human subjects that explore words like these. Hence, there isn't any real data to verify against. Oh well. If your a cognitive scientist and have some spare time, could you maybe run an experiment for me?
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I had a nice meeting with my Santiago collaborator today. After talking about the research, we talked about higher ed in Chile vs. the US. While it's a much smaller scale, there are similar macro forces at work in higher ed here and the in the US. We seem to be a bit ahead of Chile on the so-called "demographic cliff" where the number of college-going high school students is rapidly declining. Apparently, they're not expecting their cliff for another two or three years. In the US, the right is actively trying to diminish the importance of higher ed. That's not really happening in Chile.
Also, separately today, my collaborator's Phd student introduced me to a collaborator that he has in Brazil and they're interested in a collaboration. I'm supposed to meet with them next week sometime to discuss their research problem and to see if I can contribute.
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The ocean was pretty rough overnight and really hit the beaches hard. Here you can see the waves crashing up onto the flat part of the beach, which doesn't happen very often:
There was a ton of rain overnight and the little estuary river that flows into the sea here about a half-mile south of here, gushed a ton of silt into the ocean. Maybe you can see the brown streak in the ocean in this photo:
On the plus side, the departing weather system made for an absolutely gorgeous sunset this evening:
Side note, look how much further south the sun is now vs. a month ago:
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