It is upgrade Time!
2009/05/14 at 7:39 pm | In 1 | Leave a CommentToday the leading programmer of DMDX, Jonathan Forster, announced the debut of DMDX 4.0.0.0. Here is the forward message:
“So with all the recent Unicode changes and the just completed changes to the way DMDX handles other applications stealing the focus I decided we really were due for a major number revision even if it didn’t represent a wholesale revision in the code base it certainly represents wholesale changes to the way DMDX operates. So DMDX 4.0.0.0 is up on the website. Among the changes are macros working in Unicode, a small revision to the PIO code that allows it to work in limited privilege environments (without registry privilege hacks anyway) and the new SoldierOn mode. It’s worth noting DMDX 4 still used the values TimeDX 3 writes to the registry. The SoldierOn mode is active with either the command line -soldieron switch or DMDX’s EZ mode and basically allows DMDX to resume operation after another application steals the focus:
-soldieron
Prior to version 4.0.0.0 of DMDX if another application popped up a window or DMDX otherwise somehow lost it’s focus (sticky keys anyone?) it would basically hang up. Control of the machine was possible to get back with Alt-TAB and you could kill off DMDX with the task manager but that run of DMDX was toast. Onus was always on the experimenter to make sure an experimental machine was free of such software, after all if DMDX just recovered from such situations data integrity was sure to suffer, not to mention display integrity (it is possible to have display elements from previous items remain on the screen). Given the advent of remote internet testing it behooves us to make DMDX behave a little better so now the dreaded DDERR_SURFACELOST is caught and the job is terminated gracefully unless SoldierOn mode is activated with -soldieron in which case all display surfaces will be set to the default background color and DMDX will resume execution flagging that an error occurred in the output file (.AZK or .ZIL). Only real issue remaining is Alt-TABbing to the menu window of DMDX where it won’t do anything, one has to Alt-TAB to the first DMDX window (the DX window) and then the job will resume.
/”\
-jonathan (j.c.f.) \ /
X
ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN – AGAINST HTML MAIL / \
The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time. “
We may be entering the era of unicode.
Spirit of A University
2009/04/01 at 3:49 am | In 1 | Leave a CommentIt has passed a month since I entered the new career as a faculty in Hua-lien. Until now, I am looking for the way to synthesize the teaching and research. After these classes among these weeks and the experience of evaluation and accreditation for ourselves, I realized the belief what an individual graduated from a university should have is what I can count on.
Two major abilities, to summarize information and to critisize an issue, are which a mature individual should have to live independently and contribute himself to this society. Living in a internet era, to collect and filter the coming information in daily life is the routines everyone has to do if he/she has a job or runs for a higher academic acheivement. My duty in a class is to guide a student have a personal system to summarize the new information, and judge the validity and value of a news by themselves. These are the basic abilities for a scholar and a professional worker. In Taiwan, a state with so many universities, the current challenge for the faculties in each college is to improve the abilities of this generation of students. These students will decide the quality of Taiwan after they graduated. To help them gain these basic academic abilities will charge the research energy of mine. I have obtained much of help from the advisors and friends to promote my academic abilities. What I am doing is to pass this spirit to the next generation.
Sense of politics and sense of science
2009/01/31 at 4:47 pm | In Thought, politic | Leave a CommentA speech error temporarily paused the process of president Obama sworn in his duty in the inaugural day. That is the situation the president followed Chief Justice Roberts’ words “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” Mr. Obama had a pause after “execute” because he found the “faithfully” before “execute” was removed. This caused the other sworn in at the day after the inaugural day and Steven Pinker’s comment on this politics of language. One blogger criticized Pinker made a comment on the political perspective of Roberts instead of linguistic analysis, but a reader of Pinker’s books would realize this is his style. He always reveal his political orientation, medium libertarian, in his articles talking about the human nature or the evolution of human mind. A recent case is an article of individual genome on the New York Times.
The mostly interested part is the association of the political opinion and the perspective of science for a scientist. Pinker’s viewpoint to language establishes on the conceptual quirks stored in human mind. He argued that these quirks are the product of evolution and are inhered generation by generation. The unlimited combinations of quirks contribute the unlimited expressions of human languages. This argument is contrary to the generative grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky who is a famous left wing intellectual. Chomsky also has a gap in science and politics between him and Burrhus Skinner who believes a well designed reward system will improve the quality of individual behavior. Across three generations, these minds who give extraordinary contribution to the modern psychology and cognitive science have so many differences in each aspect. So many different minds compete with each other in the circumstance each mind perform their potential as they can. I have to say it is why the US have been leading the development of science (at least in my domain) till present.
Is there other society providing the distinguished mind contribute their potential regardless the political view? I think this is an interesting issue for more observations and experiences.
After Inaugural Day
2009/01/24 at 8:48 pm | In Cognition, Psychologist, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentJanuary, 20, 2009 is a day remarked the coming of new era for the American people. This year I also experienced the change within the research society I am contacting. At the day after the inaugural day, the top science journal “Nature” published a paper that will challenge the basic assumption accepted by every researchers depending on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sirotin and Dr. Das proposed the evidence that, in addition to the neural activity, a novel preparatory mechanism in the primates brain bring additional change to blood volume. I wonder the respond of my friends using fMRI as their research responds to this study. This news, in my opinion, is not totally bed for the future of cognitive neuroscience. This is the other opportunity for us to admit the complicated nature of the brain and to think of the bold but naive intention to build the link between brain and mind. The novel mechanism revealed by this study might be a caution for the optimistic views of building the link between behavior and brain function without sufficient understanding of behavioral facts.
The other change I am watching is the raising of the new perspective to the psycholinguists’ analytic tools. In the psycholinguistic studies, the generality of the empirical evidence is constrained by the variation of participants’ performance and the variation of stimuli property. For a group of stimuli with the same property according to a experimental definition, each stimuli usually generate a random effect within a wide variation. This situation increases the difficulty to conclude the effect of stimuli property based on the collected data. For a very long time, psycholinguists like to use by-item analysis for the confirmation of the observed effects. With the thousands of data accumulated, more and more psycholinguists have a thought if this analytic tool is really helpful to make conclusions. We might be expanding the frontier with an inaccurate compass. Keeping this awareness is what we should take care hour and hour in doing the psycholinguistic studies. Further reading about this issue is in the last volume of journal of memory and language, 2008.
New eye to see language
2008/12/11 at 10:30 am | In Cognition, Language, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentLike the color of hairs or the allergy to special substance, language is suggested to be a genetic mechanism created by a long evoluation process. This concept is the agreement for many scientific disciplines that explore human nature being able to communicate with language. As Marc Hauser and Thomas Bever emphasize, human neural system make us learn and use our knowledge of language seperated from the other abilities to communicate. This biological aspect of language surrounds the rules and constraints constituenting a mature individual’s knolwedge of language. All paricipanted scientific disciplines have the tasks to understand the acquisition and the mediation mechanism of these rules and constraints, to isolate the parts sharing with other animals, to trace their evolucation process, and to ask the usage of the knowledge in communicative expression. Hauser and Bever listed some study cases towarding these goals, but there is a far distance because each discipline has to break its boundary before connect with each other.
Take the issue of lexical processing I participant in as an example, there are many interesting topics waiting our investigations. Our goal is to illustrate the temporal relation between the lexical property of words and the reading performance. A pressumption under this goal is that our knowledge of language underlying the processing decides the temporal relation. The known temporal relations just cover parts of rules and constraints identified by linguistists. One reason restricting us to look at a few temporal relation is the structure of exerpimental design. An observed effect on the performance needs an appropriate fit among variables, and the serach of such an effect usually costs a series of experiments. We have broad image to connect our findings and other disciplines, but we have a extraordinary patient to accumulate the knowledge till the break of boundry. After all, the undating of scientific knolwedge is a slow process which most people are hard to understand in their daily life.
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