Posts tagged with "groundtruth"

A zoo of Latinistic abbreviations have crept into academic English: ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, ‘cf.’, ‘viz.’, ‘ibid.’, ‘op. cit.’, ‘n.b.’, ‘et al.’ They are frequently mispunctuated. Most commonly sighted are ‘eg.’, ‘ibid’, ‘et. al.’, even ‘et. al’. They are frequently misused: ‘cf.’ to mean ‘see’; ‘e.g.’ to mean ‘i.e.’ But none of...

I came across the following perfect example of the importance of the serial comma, in a ProPublica article describing a problematic data leak: The story prompted a leak investigation. The FBI sought to obtain my phone records and those of Jane Perlez, the Times bureau chief in Indonesia and my wife. Under the serial comma...

"Besides getting more data, faster, we also now use much more sophisticated learning algorithms. For instance, algorithms based on logistic regression and that support vector machines can reduce by half the amount of spam that evades filtering, compared to Naive Bayes." (Emphasis added.) — Joshua Goodman, Gordon V. Cormack, and David Heckerman....

A common source of run-on sentences is the inclusion of a parenthetical full sentence at the end of another sentence, for instance, This is an example (there may be others). This construction is always wrong. Separate the two sentences, as This is an example. (There may be others.) or coordinate...

Writers using MS Word tend to make certain standard errors in their typesetting. For instance, they use hyphens instead of em-dashes (ctrl-alt-hyphen or option-shift-hyphen). Mathematical typesetting is especially bad. There is essentially no way to typeset mathematics well in MS Word. The best solution: LaTeX.

For a while, I've been meaning to comment on the "that"/"which" controversy, the claim that "which" should not be used with restrictive relative clauses, nor "that" for nonrestrictive. From a linguistic point of view, it seems clear that this view is descriptively barren. Geoff Pullum provides a convincing and entertaining...

Different people have different styles for overall organization of a technical paper. There is the "continental" style, in which one states the solution with as little introduction or motivation as possible, sometimes not even saying what the problem was. Papers in this style tend to start like this: "Consider a...

I've just discovered James Pryor's "Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper". Despite the ostensible limited goal of the guidelines, they are much more broadly applicable than just to philosophy papers. I especially like the characterization of readers as "lazy, stupid, and mean".

People seem to fall prey to adverbials like "however" and "rather" seducing them into running on sentences. This type of approach has been used in previous models, however, the presented algorithm adopts a different foundation. But these words are not conjunctions, subordinating or otherwise. They are adverbs, like "on the...

Email messages should be treated as personal letters. You wouldn't write a handwritten letter with misspellings, would you? Or a typewritten letter in which you didn't bother to use the shift key? Then you shouldn't do that in an email. Doing so implies to many readers that you don't respect...

To recurse is to curse again, not an activity that an academic, or an algorithm for that matter, should engage in. When a process is repeated or is subject to recursion, it is said to recur.

The use of the pronoun "he" as a bound pronoun of neutral gender is problematic on two grounds. First, its use is blatantly sexist (although the sexism is of a historical nature, so that those who continue to use "he" in this way have a defensible position). Second, and more...

Pat Winston in his lecture on How to Speak notes that covering up parts of overhead transparencies and revealing them slowly like a strip-tease artist is a technique that drives 10 per cent of your audience nuts. I am in that 10 per cent. The desire to use this technique means only...

A citation is not a first-class participant in a sentence; it cannot serve as a noun phrase. Rather it is a parenthetical -- that is why it appears in parentheses -- and like all parentheticals should be removable without changing the well-formedness of the sentence in which it appears. Thus,...