field journal

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story

you are not eligible for the presidency if you are over the age of 65, if you turn 65 in office, that is fine but you cannot campaign if you are over 65

you cannot be president if you are a felon

you cannot be president if you have a personal net worth over $8 million

you cannot be presidency if you have had to file for bankruptcy in a business venture

you cannot be president if you cannot pass a basic neurological exam

you cannot be president if you have been convicted of or found liable for any sex crime, domestic violence or sexual harassment. unproven allegations are cause for investigation and can result in immediate termination from office if proven.

you cannot be president if you have been divorced more than once

you cannot be president if you never smoked weed out of a soda can in high school

it would be a mistake to think that this represents the natural behavior of chickens.

it would be a mistake to think that the social displacement harms we do to each other as marginalized people under a great deal of stress, under capitalism, represents the natural behavior of people.

But I know. I think it was me.

In my defense I never intended to start a rumor. Many years ago I worked as a cleaner at the school and one evening I had to transport one of those big floor washing machines from the basement to the second level via the elevator. When the doors opened a very confused looking man stood inside. He was one of those slicked back gym-bro IT guys and made no movement to get out. The elevator wouldn’t fit him, me and the machine so I asked “Where are you going? Up or down?”

He gave me a smug shit-eating grin and said “Down?” in a mocking tone.

It took me a second to realize that of course he wasn’t going down, we were in the basement, but his look and tone annoyed me so much I refused to admit I misspoke and instead said “Yeah, down. I don’t know if you’re going to the second basement”

His smile disappeared “There’s a second basement?”

“Yeah but it sounds like you don’t have access to it so I guess you’re going up? I’ll just wait”

I never thought of it as anything other than a funny story to tell about that time I got so annoyed with a guy that I invented an entire second basement, but it turns out he probably refused to believe a cleaner fooled him and the story spread.

I used to work as a live-in nanny for a pediatrician.

Now, the thing about hospitals in my country is that they are massively understaffed and massively underfunded. This is especially true outside the major cities. The staff are worked to the bone and receive little to no help in things like finding accommodation or childcare, making working in rural areas a very uninviting prospect; staff come out here, get lumped with the work of three people (because there's nobody else to do it), burn out under the workload and leave, meaning that those remaining have even more work because that person is gone. It's unsustainable and the medical staff are doing their best to sustain it, because people die if they don't, so to the higher-ups it looks like everything's getting done and therefore everything is fine.

My friend (and boss) worked one week on, one week off, swapping out with another pediatrician. This was necessary because it would not be physically possible for one person to handle the workload for longer periods of time. The one single pediatrician had to hold up the entire pediatrics ward, which was not only the only public hospital pediatrics ward in our town, but also the one that served all the towns around us for a few hours' drive in all directions. I regularly saw her go to work sick, aching, tired, or with a debilitating 'I can barely make words or see' level migraine, because if she took a day off, twenty children didn't get healthcare that day, and some of these kids' appointments were scheduled weeks in advance. She'd work long hours in the day and then be called in a couple of times overnight for an hour or two at a time (she was on-call at night too, because somebody had to be), and then go in the next day. Sometimes she would be forced to take a day off because she physically could not stay awake for longer than a few minutes at a time, meaning she couldn't drive to work.

Cue my niece's second birthday coming up in Melbourne. I'd been working for her for about 3 years, and she (and the hospital) had plenty of advance warning that I (and therefore she) needed one (1) Friday off. That's fine, we'll find someone to work that Friday, the hospital said. Right up until the last week where they're like "oh, we can't find a replacement; you can come in, can't you?"

No, she tells them; I don't have anyone to watch my kid that day.

Oh, surely you can hire a babysitter for this one day, they say. Think of the children! We really really need you to work that day. I know we said it'd be fine but we need you now, there's no one else to do it.

There are no other babysitters, she told them. Unless you can find one?

That's not our responsibility, they said.

But I'm not changing my plans, she's got plans by now as well, the hospital knew about this one day weeks in advance, and with absolutely no reserve staff they're forced to reschedule all pediatrics appointments for that Friday. Not a huge deal, it happens on the 'physically too overworked to get out of bed' days too. I go to Melbourne, she goes back to her home in Adelaide for her recovery week, all should be on track.

My niece gives me Covid.

This was way back in the first wave of the pandemic, and there were no Covid vaccines yet. The rules were isolate, mask up, hope. I had Covid in the house, and it would've been madness for my friend and her toddler to come back into the Covid house instead of staying in Adelaide. There was absolutely no way that a pediatrician could live with someone in quarantine due to Covid and go to work in the hospital with sick children every day. And no support existed for finding another babysitter, or temporary accommodation, so the hospital was down a pediatrician.

The other pediatrician wasn't available to do a three-week stint. They were also trapped in Adelaide on their well-earned week off.

Meaning that the only major pediatrics ward within a several-hour radius had no pediatricians. They had to shut down and send all urgent cases to Adelaide for the week. To the complete absence of surprise of any of the doctors or nurses; of course this would happen, this was bound to happen, it presumably keeps happening. But probably to the surprise of the higher-ups. After all, the hospital was doing fine, right? Of course all the staff were complaining of overwork and a lack of resources in every meeting, but they could always be fobbed off with the promise of more help sometime in the future; the work was mostly getting done, so the issue couldn't be too urgent.

Don't stretch yourselves to the breaking point to keep doing as much as possible, and don't cut corners where customers/clients/patients/patrons won't notice. Say out loud, "Due to low funding/staffing, we can no longer do X," where X is something visible but not mission-critical.

In the library world, this is usually a small reduction in hours: we lose an employee position, we stop being open on Sundays, or we close an hour earlier every day. (And we put up signs saying exactly why, and to whom patrons can complain.)

If you say "this isn't enough resources/we're understaffed/we can't go on like this," but then you continue to go on like this? You've just proved that you can indeed go on like this.

Of course, not everyone is in a position where you can make decisions like this--reducing hours, or suspending a particular service; the reason we learn this in library school is that we usually have a clear bright line between operational management and funding. However, you can still ask. Management says, "For now this store is going to have to get by with 6 employees instead of 7," you say, "Okay; what are we going to stop doing, to make that work?"

And if the answer is, "Nothing," you just...let the problems happen. Someone gets sick, and they really need you to come on your day off? Sorry, but you made plans that you can't break (even if those plans are "lay in bed and eat ice cream"). But they can't open the store if you don't come in? Sounds like the store isn't going to be open. Hopefully we'll be able to get up to full staffing before this problem comes up again!

In the story above, the COVID quarantine situation was, of course, unpredictable, but if management had taken the lesson any of the times when appointments had to be cancelled because a doctor called off due to physical exhaustion, perhaps they would have had some options when both of their pediatricians were unavailable due to a global health emergency; who can say?

a computational linguist essentially works with natural language processing (NLP) models and one responsibility is figuring out a way to abstract into and implement numerical representations of grammar, syntax, and pragmatics (all of which we usually just say are "syntactic units") so that a computer can understand it and basically create mathematical formulas for language that can also be transformed into language that a human understands. in early NLP work, you usually implemented dictionary databases of a language's words and then applied linguistic rules to it like what classification of word it is (ex. verb, noun, pronoun, etc.) and word order of a source/language. down the line, when computing costs became cheaper, these syntactic units and rules had an additional feature of probability added to it (ex. based on language data statistics, which is the most likely meaning for this word-unit?) and then computational linguists had to figure out a way to translate that into computer language and formulas to computers so (1) the computer can "understand" human language and (2) so it can output high-fidelity (aka correct grammar) language that a human could understand instead of just 0s and 1s.

an example of NLP architecture would be a parse tree (left image) linguistics version that is understandable to a human (right image) computational linguistics version that contains nodes that simply references a data point which holds a word. (similar to how symbols work/symbolic reference of say a node = symbolic reference of a letter/visual aesthetics of a word). that abstracted node version of a language tree can easily be translated into another language tree which is then decoded as another language. as a metaphor think of a german tree to french tree.

computational linguistics nowadays is centered on large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI, and it takes the probability feature in previous NLP models to the max. it trains on millions of data and learns how important each syntactic unit is based on the other syntactic unit in a sentence and the entire paragraph—this is called the "attention mechanism", or what people call "context"—(depending on how much electrical power and time you can spare) , then does that again dozens and dozens of times until it generates an output that we, humans, understand as language. and this comp lingustics isn't limited to visual language (reading/writing), there's some that deal with spoken or audio language; the ability to recognize or generate auditory language. it's based on the same premise except an additional axis of data are audio files. phonetics get involved so phoneticians and phonologists are valuable in that aspect of comp linguistics. one part of computational linguistics is trying to find a more efficient way to do all those attention mechanisms in a way that takes up less time and electricity. another part is trying to figure out a better way to represent language as a math formula (in a way). there's also fine-tuning any errors or improving the fidelity of NLP results. there's also the subfield of computational semantics which deals with the tokenization or quantification of the meaning/interpretation/semantics/pragmatics of language and embedding into or advancing current technology of NLP models. there's other parts too like cryptography in comp linguistics where you try to figure out a more abstracted model of language and how to assign different word classes to each word, or a more efficient way to do so. that specialty leans very heavily into "pure linguistics" even if you eventually have to turn it into symbolic mathematics.

in the parse trees you shared, the order of the nodes in the human readable version and in the computer version don't match. what are the rules like for that? also, the computer one has one extra node, the epsilon one. how come?