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I recently have been working on a WordPress plugin called WP-Smartdate and I’m happy to say that it is hosted at wordpress.org starting today. As some people have noticed, my blog recently has included little links on word like “yesterday,” with a machine readable version of the date reference (called a “microformat” in the biz). Download the plugin and get started!

This blog post describes release 0.1… For the latest description, check out the WP-Smartdate plugin page or mitcho.com/code.

Please comment! I would love to hear your feedback on the plugin.

Description

WP-Smartdate looks for relative date expressions in your blog posts, such as “tomorrow,” “this coming Monday,” “last Friday,” and adds the date reference (like “2007-11-26”) as a machine-readable microformat.

Why Smartdate?

WP-Smartdate was created for three simple audiences:

1. For the machine: While many professional information retrieval algorithms go far beyond the scope of this program, smartdate helps the process along by adding machine-readable tags to relative date expressions.¹ In addition, these machine tags, in turn, help the human: a search on Google for “November 7th, 2007,” for example, will not pull up a document talking about “yesterday,” written on the 8th, but it will pull up the smartdate output of 2007-11-07.
2. For the human reader: Blog posts are often written in the “now,” using relative time expressions without concern for how the text will be read in the future. WP-Smartdate makes such posts easier to read and comprehend temporally².
3. For me: Because I think this sort of thing is fun!

A typology of smartdate date expressions

The following types of expressions are resolved with respect to the speech time—in WP-Smartdate’s case, the blog post date.

1. simple references: “yesterday,” “today,” “tomorrow,”
2. next/last DOTW expressions: “next Friday,” “this past Sunday,” “this Monday”

For the future

• static dates: “January 1st, 2007”
• duration shift expressions: “5 days ago,” “fourscore and seven years ago”
• day of the week shifts: “2 Fridays ago”
• clean up the code!

1

A little while ago I read a NY Times blog entitled Chinese Recycling by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The piece opened as a description of the collection of food waste on Yangtze riverboats and went on to compare this situation to food production and consumption in the US. The article—in my opinion unfortunately—did not continue to discuss the tradition of responsible recycling in East Asia.

Not everyone lives on a riverboat, and recycling in the city is of course far more challenging. The exact things Slaughter frowns upon, such as plastic packaging, are the enemy. Trash and recycling pickup in Taiwan does not involve leaving it on the side of the street… the trash car,² followed by the recycling truck, come down the street playing a catchy tune (the same as in Japan, in fact). You have to run out and give them your trash and recycling (and organic waste, another category), sometimes running after the trucks a bit. There’s nothing passive about it.³ Unlike Japan with its anal retentive trash pickup, there aren’t any monthly recycling calendars dictating when you can take out your old stereo. But in some communities there are certain days of the week for glass, aluminum, etc… in the rural community where I live, they take all recycling every day, together, but the recycling man on the truck sorts the recycling right as you give it to him. I try to give my different types of recycling separately to make his life easier.

Taiwan has also cracked down on plastic bags—in some places, you can get them, but you’ll have to pay a dollar or two NT (about 5 cents US). Some places don’t have them at all. The Anya Hindmarch “I Am Not A Plastic Bag” bag has also been a big seller in Taiwan, receiving media attention as 環保包 or 環保袋 (huánbǎobāo, huánbǎodài, “the environmental protection bag”). Here’s a photo of one I snapped at the ETA-ROC conference.

Failing to properly dispose of garbage, recycling, and organic waste lead to pretty steep fines. In addition, businesses, especially restaurants, are subject to compulsory recycling programs. Even McDonald’s has separate trash and recycling bins, with photos of what items go where right on top. Taiwan recycles 26.6 percent of all its waste, as of 2006, up from 5.87 percent in 1998. The efforts put into the consistent and professional trash and recycling programs have also cut down on customs such as trash burning which pollute the air. This and various legislation have vastly improved both water and air quality in the past 20 years.

With the pressure of being a small island nation comes a heightened responsibility for the responsible use of its land and resources. Taiwan is a leader in this area, continuously improving its waste management systems through innovation and legislation. Such practices would be interesting to compare to many American communities.

Every day at school they play some music over the PA after lunch and during cleaning time. Today I really enjoyed the music, which was not the usual classical or opera (our orchestra teacher normally chooses from “the classics”), and asked some teachers for the artist name. I then found a couple CD’s by the artist, 王宏恩 (Wáng Hóng’ēn), on the way to Chinese class in Yilan. The CD’s are solid overall. 王宏恩 is a Bunun aboriginal whose aboriginal name is biung tak-banuaz, and half his songs are in the Bunun language. To my pleasant surprise one CD also included a song we dance to at Nanao Elementary every week. The song is called “Buklavu,” written about his hometown and sung in Bunun. it’s beautiful, incredibly catchy, and encapsulates the aborigines’ energy. I found the song online and have embedded it here:

In addition, here’s a YouTube video of someone who’s figured out another one of my favorite songs of his: a beautiful song called “Ana tupa tu” (“moon”). I may try to learn parts of it, but simplified… it’s a little intense.

Last Friday night there was a Thanksgiving dinner at AIT. Seeing as it’s a faux-embassy, we expected faux-turkey, but were instead greeted with a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, albeit without any stuffing. Afterwards K80, Dale, Michelle and I, along with Ellen from the Foundation, went out to a bar/café near 師大. I ordered a “Mexican iced coffee,” having no idea what I was getting, and got a coffee with whipped cream and a raw egg on top. I wonder if they really do that in Mexico… somehow I seriously doubt it.

It tasted alright… mostly like a sweet coffee drink, though K80 and Dale thought they could taste the egg. (I tried to stir the egg in.) My guess is that if it came with the raw egg stirred in the drink rather than sitting on top, I would have had no idea and would have really enjoyed it.

My next adventure was this past Saturday, when Michelle and I went out to 南方澳 (nánfāng’ào).¹ We took Michelle’s scooter from Luodong, taking the better part of an hour to get there. Nanfangao is a port city, right next to the port of Suao. There’s a famous temple there and the weekend streets had many people walking around with incense.

We also checked out a tourist spot, 豆腐岬 (dòu.fujiǎ), Tofu Cape. I asked some random tourist why it was called that and she said it was because the rocks cut off into square-ish pieces there, which made sense enough. However, my co-teacher Jennifer later told me that that was wrong and it was called that because some tofu-eating fish that can be caught in that area.

The tofu, by the way, doesn’t taste very good. I also saw that other people take jumping photos as well.

We then drove around, checked out the beach (and a temple nearby), ate some delicious seafood noodles, and finally went to see a lion on the hill.

Finally, yesterday Jennifer took me with her son to Taipei to shop at CostCo. While I’ve never been a fan of CostCo, Wal-Mart, or any of those huge stores, this Taiwanese CostCo was both frightening and awesome. There’s something great and very comfortable about someplace where you can get gallon jugs of ketchup but also green tea, six packs of Pocky, and huge packs of udon noodles; with どら焼き right next to the pumpkin pie. Afterwards Jennifer’s sister and her husband took us to 淡水 (dànshǔi), a touristy port city north of Taipei, where we ate some great food (fish/pork-ball soup and deep fried shrimp rolls).

As my family and Bailey are coming to visit me soon, I decided to write up some basic survival tips for visiting Taiwan. While most aspects of living in Taiwan are very similar to the US or Japan, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Don’t flush the toilet paper in the toilets. For this reason, almost every bathroom here has a trash basket. Also, keep some tissue paper on you as most public restrooms do not provide paper.

2. Don’t drink the tap water. I don’t know what happens if you do, as I haven’t tried, but I’m not planning on it. The good news is that most public buildings and many other establishments have drinking water machines. Bring a good water bottle.¹

3. If you’re visiting northern Taiwan in the winter, bring some raingear. Sure, you’ll probably buy a few umbrellas (I’m on number three), but rain coats are pretty useful too. You can also be really Taiwanese by wearing your raincoat backwards.²

4. Taiwan is big on recycling. Luckily, though, in most places there’s just a trash can (垃圾桶, pronounced lèsètǒng as opposed to the Mainland lājītǒng) and a recycling bin… in general, most paper and plastic containers that don’t have food waste can be recycled. Plastic bags and wrapping cannot be.

5. Keep all your receipts. Taiwan has a receipt lottery (formally the Uniform-Invoice Prize). While you can claim it as a foreign visitor with a valid visa, as the winning numbers are released about a couple months after each time period ends, you’ll probably just want to give the receipts to me. ^^
   

6. Oh, and cold tea is sweetened by default. This freaked me out when I first tried some. Just a warning.

Of course, if you’re not planning to visit me yet but have time between late-January and mid-February (my Chinese New Year break), let me know. Let’s talk.

This past Wednesday after the weekly workshop, we stepped outside of the teachers’ center and saw some firemen-in-training doing a drill. They had a huge bucket of water (into which we wanted to throw Kelly).

They turn on the water, run out and extinguish the “fire.”

For some ungodly reason we were standing out there watching them practice for over an hour, most of which was downtime. Most of the practice seemed to involve wrapping up the hoses afterwards rather than focusing on running out to the fire quickly… it didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the firefighters here but, hey, I guess there’s a reason they’re still training. ^^

I spent this past weekend in Taiwan, attending the English Teaching Association of the Republic of China (ETA-ROC) conference. While the original intention was for a number of us ETA’s to go, it ended up that I went alone. I saw a number of talks Saturday… I went to a number of the more theoretical or quantitative talks and had a great time. I saw Krashen talk again, this time on the Comprehension Hypothesis. I have to say, he’s a fabulous speaker, and the case studies he looked at for this talk were fascinating: a Mexican immigrant who worked in a deli and learned Hebrew before he knew it, a culture where the rule is that you can’t marry someone who speaks the same language as you, etc. ^^ I also saw Andrew Cohen from Minnesota which made me miss Minnesota a bit.

The conference was held at the Chien Tan Youth Activity Center which has a beautiful pond and great view of the Grand Hotel, on the site of an old Shinto shrine.

As I recently did a little editing for a journal on English teaching here, I was invited to the presenters’ dinner Saturday night. While it was slightly awkward at first, not being a presenter myself, I soon met two representatives from the Korea and Philippines TESOL organizations who were very kind to me and we had some great conversations and laughs. (They are the two on the right in the first photo. The second photo is with the Filipino representative, Bernard Spolsky and me.)

I stayed overnight Saturday at the Eight Elephants hostel. Less than a year old, Eight Elephants is stylish, clean, and comfortable, though not the cheapest hostel in town. My experience there was great… I made a friend, a student of Special Education from Kaohsiung, and we went out to the nearby Shida night market. After randomly running into Kate who was in Taipei with her host family, she took me to a cafe she knew and we had a great time talking. While her English is great as well, we were talking completely in Chinese. After spending the day thinking about comprehensible input, it was great listening to her, understanding about 80%, and chiming in once in a while. As her interests were teaching and learning languages (including Japanese), we hit it off well with some great conversation. I look forward to seeing her again when I visit Kaohsiung in the near future.

On Sunday morning I saw another talk by Andrew Cohen, had lunch, and met up with a couple of the interns at the Fulbright Taiwan foundation who showed me around Taipei. We went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and randomly ran into Dr. Wu Jing-jyi, the director of the Foundation, on the plaza. We then went to check out the Taipei Modern Art Museum (with the first .museum address I’ve ever actually seen), which was super cheap and very enjoyable, albeit being relatively small. (The last photo below is at the Taipei Story House, which is a historic building—we just took a picture outside without going in.)

We had some Hong Kong-style 燒臘 preserved meat for dinner. I came back to Nanao Sunday night feeling fulfilled and blessed by the people I’d met all weekend, at the conference, at the hostel, and around the city.

From Rands in Repose’s Nerd Handbook, probably a good guide for Bailey (though I don’t quite fit the target completely):

But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

I feel this phenomenon exists in formal linguistics as well, where the elegance of an analysis may be measured in theory-internal terms. It’s hard to get other people excited when they don’t share that same background, precisely as there is no physical manifestation of an analysis. At least Bailey’s good about listening, trying to understand, and being happy for me. ^^

(via Daring Fireball)

Yesterday we ETA’s went to a workshop at Lan-Yang Institute of Technology. The workshops were focused around the instruction of reading. The three afternoon sessions we saw included two workshops on building vocabulary and one by Stephen Krashen.

Krashen is kind of like the Chomsky of language acquisition and teaching—a huge and controversial (some may say incendiary) figure who you can love or hate, but can’t ignore. Last Wednesday in our weekly workshop, Dr. Collins delivered a chronological run down of Krashen’s theories.¹ As an entertaining aside, one task given to us was to draw a schematic diagram of Krashen’s view of language acquisition and production. Below is Dale’s drawing, which eerily reflects the geography of the brain… the input comes in through the ears (or eyes, at the back of the brain), then hits the Affective Filter (the amygdala), goes to the Language Acquisition Device (the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas), then the output is filtered by the Monitor—a product of conscious learning—(the frontal lobe). Pretty creepy.

Krashen’s talk² was fascinating, albeit not what I expected: given that the workshop’s focus was on the teaching of reading and that he himself has been a big advocate of recreational reading for language learners, I expected more on teaching English reading as to non-native speakers. The majority of the talk, though, was on writing and the composing process: “reading more makes you a better writer, but writing more makes you smart.” He talked about how the act of (regular) writing clarifies and organizes our thoughts, and advocated for a writing process which involved much revision as, “every time you have to revise, it means you’ve become smarter,” and building relaxation (to allow for eureka moments) into the process. His conclusion and analysis are important for first-language speakers just as much as the second-language learner, and the talk did feel more like a writing seminar than a pedagogical one. Krashen is an engaging and entertaining speaker, using many examples from famous writers and common experience to draw his conclusion.

The intensity with which he spoke and the passion for thinking about thinking reminded me of Sally’s Honors Analysis class, which was as much about thinking as it was about mathematics. Sally once told us that, when we’re stuck on a problem, we should find someone just about as smart as us and just explain the problem to them. He claimed that the majority of the time, the simple process of explaining the problem outloud and answering clarifying questions would make the solution come to us. It’s a powerful technique that I’ve used many times at Chicago and elsewhere, and Krashen’s analysis of what happens when we write thus struck a chord with me.

Afterwards I was fortunate enough to go out to dinner with the speakers, some of our advisors, and some faculty from the Institute that hosted the workshop. I had some great conversations about my background, where my future directions may lie academically, and of course the ideas. ^^ It reminded me of dinners with linguists back at home, after a workshop or CLS. I realized I miss the fraternity of academia—the sense of mutual respect and interest academics have for each other’s work and ideas, even if the “other” is only 22 years old.

A sixth grader at Nan-ao today gave Jennifer and me cell phone charms. ^^

I do believe she made it herself. The large bead on top is unique… it is very geometric and features diamonds. In Atayal culture, diamonds represent the eyes of ancestors watching over us. I love the green color of the beads too… it complements my phone very well. ^^

All last week, I taught a Halloween lesson for all of my classes. Both of my schools got decked out in Halloween decor: Jack O’Lanterns, ghosts, bats, etc.

I was dressed as the devil, coming to class late and scaring the children. Then I introduced some basic Halloween vocab, like “bat,” “pumpkin,” “witch,” “ghost,” etc.

I then told a story about a girl who always wears a green scarf… the punchline is that she’s old and takes her scarf off and her head falls off. Some kids were scared, but many thought it was funny.

We then taught them about Halloween costumes and they drew what they wanted to be for Halloween.

This one was particularly sweet… but, then again, we were also in the process of grading their midterms then. ^^

At the end they Trick or Treat’ed and got candy. All the kids had a lot of fun. ^^

“I’m eating a baby.”

I use zenphoto as the backend to my photos section with a custom theme to hook into my site’s navigation and such. I chose zenphoto for my website a year ago based on it’s main strength: simplicity. It does much less than the competition, but it does what I need it to do—for the most part. It’s a fantastic bare-bones mysql/php photo gallery option.

Since then, though, I (along with many others) have been slightly disappointed by the lack of development in the promising project, without having the time or energy to pitch in myself. Such is life. But now the wait is over: Zenphoto 1.1 is out.

Zenphoto 1.1, I believe, does a good job balancing this tradition of simplicity with some popular new features. Highlights include (there are many) tagging, subalbums, chronological archives, RSS feeds, EXIF support, Google Maps, search, and preliminary video support. Exciting stuff.

As I maintain my own theme, though, some of these new features of course require me to update my theme. Below is my rough guide to editing your theme to take maximum advantage of zenphoto 1.1.

(more…)

Today was the ROC Year 96 Yilan county English Easy Go! competition. There are two parts to the fall competition: a song competition (song and dance, costumes, sets, the whole nine-yards) and a reader-theater. I think the competition is a great idea, getting kids all over the county excited about English through performance.

A group of 11 6th graders from Penglai have been practicing for the song competition for the past month or so under my co-teacher Jennifer’s direction. They sang and danced to the Fiona Fung song “Proud of You.”

The military guy and I met the kids at the train station at 7AM.

The kids liked playing with my camera and abusing me.

The competition was held at 凱旋國小, a huge elementary school.

We first practiced downstairs a few times and hung out. They were all wearing little angel crown-ish things, black t-shirt with a gold “belt” of tape, and bells on their wrists.

Our school was the third group in the later-morning performance group. They were not at all nervous and did fabulously!

All of us ETA’s were of course all there with our respective teams. In the photo below Katie is videotaping another school’s choreographer standing in the back of the crowd dancing with/directing the kids. He had this whole face, haircut, and outfit that screamed “I am a choreographer.”

Then we came home. A great time was had by all. ^^

From a CLV job description:

The division currently provides language and cultural-immersion programs to over 4500 children, youth, families and adults in a variety of settings, primarily near Bemidji, Minn. with a significant expansion to a location in the Twin Cities metro area anticipated in 2008. Enrollment is targeted to more than double in the next five years. [Emphasis mine.]

Wow.