Today I read an article on a new contest hosted by Kraggle, a platform for data-crunching competitions, to create a suitable algorithm to grade essays. Since I am taking CSC401: Natural Language Processing, this caught my eye and wasted the time I allocated to do my CSC401 final assignment.
I believe this may solve some problems regarding how inconsistent high school English class is with grading. Often, English teachers will give good grades to students they have a good impression of. My personal experience was that after the first good initial essay, I can just mess around and still maintain an A average for English. However, the overall idea of relying on an algorithm to grade students is pretty flawed.
For one thing, clever students will be able to find out which aspects of a written essay would get them a better mark and emphasize those aspects. This creates very one-sided writing styles where students don't write for the sake of expressing their point in a nice way. Instead, students will be writing in order to try and trick more points from the algorithm.
If properly written, a good algorithm would definitely be useful as a supplement to a human marker. However, it is unlikely that human markers will be completely replaced in the near future.
[The Article In Question]
Thursday, 29 March 2012
China Smack and Korea Bang
Since I grew up in Canada, my knowledge of written Chinese is outright shameful. Even though I went to Chinese school every week for 5 years, I am still unable to read and understand Chinese newspapers. That's why I was overjoyed when I found the site China Smack. The site's concept is simple - they take interesting news bytes from Chinese news and social networks, and translate popular comments into English so us English-readers can understand them.
China Smack and Korea Bang, the Korean equivalent of the former, is a valuable window into the views of the 'average' Chinese/Korean internet commenter. Not only do the sites translate comments, they also explain culturally specific sayings and memes.
It seemed to me that these social networks and memes were developing in parallel to the English equivalents. Chinese speakers have their own youtube, their own facebook, and so on. Japanese speakers also have their own very developed, Japanese-specific sites for most things.
I found it really interesting to see how citizens from different countries act on the internet One thing I noticed with Chinese comments was how sarcastic most of the comments were. Many comments consist of crude humour and speculation of potential funny situations relevant to the article. Most of the comments had a very down-to-earth and skeptical attitude, and if someone got too into a point of view, there will inevitably be another comment ridiculing them for not being 'realistic'. However, compared to english online communities, the comments were rarely very negative and hateful.
Korea Bang is a new spin off inspired by China Smack. Reading the comments, I found a few differences in general attitude compared to the comments in China Smack. Korean 'netizens' were often more serious and stayed more on topic. Posts also averaged out to be a bit longer and many of them were quite informative and had actual figures and facts. Overall, Korean commenter were a lot less light hearted and easily outraged compared to the biting sarcasm of Chinese commenter.
Of course, my observations are only based off translated comments so they are not very accurate. One of my tentative life goals is to learn enough languages to be able to experience more of these different cultures, both online and offline. The Internet is a great resource for understanding foreign cultures, and I fully intend to take advantage of it.
China Smack and Korea Bang, the Korean equivalent of the former, is a valuable window into the views of the 'average' Chinese/Korean internet commenter. Not only do the sites translate comments, they also explain culturally specific sayings and memes.
It seemed to me that these social networks and memes were developing in parallel to the English equivalents. Chinese speakers have their own youtube, their own facebook, and so on. Japanese speakers also have their own very developed, Japanese-specific sites for most things.
I found it really interesting to see how citizens from different countries act on the internet One thing I noticed with Chinese comments was how sarcastic most of the comments were. Many comments consist of crude humour and speculation of potential funny situations relevant to the article. Most of the comments had a very down-to-earth and skeptical attitude, and if someone got too into a point of view, there will inevitably be another comment ridiculing them for not being 'realistic'. However, compared to english online communities, the comments were rarely very negative and hateful.
Korea Bang is a new spin off inspired by China Smack. Reading the comments, I found a few differences in general attitude compared to the comments in China Smack. Korean 'netizens' were often more serious and stayed more on topic. Posts also averaged out to be a bit longer and many of them were quite informative and had actual figures and facts. Overall, Korean commenter were a lot less light hearted and easily outraged compared to the biting sarcasm of Chinese commenter.
Of course, my observations are only based off translated comments so they are not very accurate. One of my tentative life goals is to learn enough languages to be able to experience more of these different cultures, both online and offline. The Internet is a great resource for understanding foreign cultures, and I fully intend to take advantage of it.
Monday, 12 March 2012
Bill C-30 and Child Abuse
My problem with Bill C-30 is that child pornography is only the result of the bigger problem of child abuse. The correlation between child porn viewing and child abuse is unclear. In fact, this study suggests that access to child pornography is linked to the decline of actual child abuse. Therefore, I feel that targeting child pornography so specifically doesn't seem like an efficient action.
Before I start sounding like a child-porn-supporter, child pornography is undoubtedly a terrible thing because the child in the videos/pictures are being abused directly. It's too difficult to reduce the demand for child pornography because it's a combination of social and biological desires. It's more important to try to prevent the conditions for abuse from happening.
As a result, I don't think spying on citizens in case they look at child porn will stop people from abusing children. As I noted before, there is no link between looking at child porn and abusing actual children. Looking at child porn is all weird and wrong and etc, but if we're going to be taking drastic measures to stop child porn, I rather those drastic measures be better thought out and more effective.
I do not mind losing my privacy for something that's a good cause. You can peep on my browsing habits all you want if it's going to save some 9 year old from being raped. But research shows it probably won't be doing anything.
A possible solution for our society to take is to demonize child abuse even more in the media and brainwash the next generation into never sexually abusing kids.
Friday, 17 February 2012
Facebook and Paranoia
Privacy isn't very important for me, but I recognize the negative effects sharing too much online can have. This article from The Globe and Mail talks about how sharing too much on Facebook can make it easier for criminals to conduct fraudulent activities.
It reminds me of an experience I had back in high school, my friends and I played a prank on another friend who had a bad habit of falling in love with people online. We made a fake persona for him to fall in love with as sort of an intervention. He, as we expected, fell in love with the 'girl' (who was ironically controlled by another girl he used to have a crush on). It was really mean, I kind of regret it now, but at least he took it well and laughs about it now.
That experience also taught me a lesson. Now, I don't take any thing I see online that seriously. Anybody who messages me could be another person controlling that person's account. For any deep, serious conversations that could potentially be embarrassing I usually prefer voice chat or video chat.
This article proves my point. The article mentions a sex offender that posed as highschool girls in order to get guys to send embarrassing pictures to them. The sex offender would then blackmail these guys for sexual favours.
When I think of privacy online, I usually think in terms of employment. Will posting this picture make it harder for me to get a job? I try to pretend I'm a recruiter and look at my own public profile to make sure nothing is too nasty out there. That being said, I feel I have a pretty balanced online life. Some people go all out and deactivate Facebook, but they really miss out on Facebook's ability to plan events and to allow people to share experiences with each other. It seems like that using services such as Facebook is a trade off between convenience and privacy.
It reminds me of an experience I had back in high school, my friends and I played a prank on another friend who had a bad habit of falling in love with people online. We made a fake persona for him to fall in love with as sort of an intervention. He, as we expected, fell in love with the 'girl' (who was ironically controlled by another girl he used to have a crush on). It was really mean, I kind of regret it now, but at least he took it well and laughs about it now.
That experience also taught me a lesson. Now, I don't take any thing I see online that seriously. Anybody who messages me could be another person controlling that person's account. For any deep, serious conversations that could potentially be embarrassing I usually prefer voice chat or video chat.
This article proves my point. The article mentions a sex offender that posed as highschool girls in order to get guys to send embarrassing pictures to them. The sex offender would then blackmail these guys for sexual favours.
When I think of privacy online, I usually think in terms of employment. Will posting this picture make it harder for me to get a job? I try to pretend I'm a recruiter and look at my own public profile to make sure nothing is too nasty out there. That being said, I feel I have a pretty balanced online life. Some people go all out and deactivate Facebook, but they really miss out on Facebook's ability to plan events and to allow people to share experiences with each other. It seems like that using services such as Facebook is a trade off between convenience and privacy.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)