Travelling With Hope

For a finale in Thailand I flew down to Bangkok to visit a friend so we could do fun stuff around the city. It was quite an experience. Growing up in upstate NY and living in Chiang Mai was no preparation for going to a massive 3rd world city. There was so many things to see and do, so much that I enjoyed just walking around and staring at things. I visited a wat because it was at least 4x bigger than all the wats in Chiang Mai and I ended up talking to a Thai man for about an hour. I think he just wanted to practice his English, he was enjoyable to talk to.

The two days that I spent in Bangkok were very fun filled, although not necessarily relaxing. On my way into the city I had some confusion as to which guesthouse I was supposed to be meeting Vic at, so I didn't get to the guesthouse until 1:30am. Then I wasn't tired and I figured I could sleep in late so I stayed up to 3am to write emails, followed by an early 6:30am breakfast, a couple days of heavy tourism, and now flying to the other side of the world. My body should be sufficiently confused by the time I arrive.

As I left Bangkok, I boarded my flight with 90 seconds to spare. Things have fallen into place unusually well, despite unfortunate situations. All this continually reminds me that I'm completely in God's hands; all I can do is trust Him. If I get to see Kerianne safely, I can consider it a blessing and a gift from God. If I find a decent job in a timely fashion, I will have no one to thank but God for watching over me. I've found a lot of comfort in this.

Thanksgiving

I went walking around the city again this morning. It is a lot of fun to just stroll around, grab some mangos and sticky rice, sit down for some coffee, have a Thai-style massage, and generally just chill out and relax. Here are some good pictures.

http://houghton.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2011492&l=be4db&id=100300825

When I went to Wawee coffee (a coffee shop), the lady before me spoke English and so I noticed the cashier could speak excellent English. However, I ordered in Thai anyway and he responded in a long string of Thai to which I responded, "In English?". We both burst out into laughter.

I also got a Thai massage. It's a specialty in Northern Thailand so obviously I was obliged to do so. It was very relaxing, minus the bending me in half and beating on my head, and a few other things. I picked up a few Christmas presents from a couple different shops. Church tonight was especially fun. It was a very active Thanksgiving service, and quite a joyful one at that. There's a lot that I'm going to miss about Chiang Mai, but when juxtaposed with the thought of seeing Kerianne I really can't wait to get home.

There's a lot to be thankful for. I'm thankful that I've had the opportunity to come here. I've also learned a lot about hope and prayer. Things in my life like family and friends are now extremely valuable to me. Yes, I think I've changed.

Doi Suthep revisited

This past weekend I took a song thao up to the wat on Doi Suthep. It's a rather famous one, so I figured I should go see why everyone visits it. It was quite amazing, lots of bright colors. I took a video of some Lanna dancers dancing to the northern Thai style music.

I also posted more pictures with comments to facebook, so feel free to browse them.




In other news, I leave Chiang Mai December 1st in the afternoon and arrive in the L.A. airport in time to spend the night on a terminal bench, perhaps I'll make it worthwhile and visit Hollywood.

Banana Rotis

A while back I took these videos. It's an India food that made it's way all over Asia, I think it should make its way around North America too. Although, it takes some practice (as you can see)

Time and Its Dramatic Effects

In the last 20 minutes the sun has been setting and I inadvertently found myself at http://nist.gov trying to set my computer clock to auto-update it's time. However, I found a wonderful applet that shows where the sun is shining all over the world (link). Here is a screen shot of what it looked like when I was looking at it, I added some red dots to show locations. The sun is almost shining on both me and all my friends and family in NY at the same time...so close. The applet is animated to show the the map in real time, so I can actually sit here and "watch the sun rise" over NY.

Since I've been in Thailand I've noticed a characteristic of people around my age in that Thais aren't really much different from Americans. For instance, they listen to the same music as I do. There was a Hardcore/Metal music festival in Chiang Mai earlier this month where bands from Bangkok, Chiang Mai and other parts of Thailand gathered around to play some of the crazy extreme music that I've come to love so much. I was talking to a couple Chinese teenagers last week who listen to the coolest emo/punk bands from the US - and have all their tee shirts and other paraphernalia! They also watch similar movies, go shopping, wear the same kinds of clothes. I've also noticed that the younger generation of Thais tend to be obviously bigger than their parents (I assume because of increased wealth and so increase food, especially as they were growing up).

The trend of increased communication lines like cell phones, TV, IM, email, Facebook and text messaging allow Chinese kids to hear about trends on the other side of the world on a daily (or hourly) basis. In an increasingly real sense, my generation is defined by the Internet and technology that surround us. Because of the dramatic sense that it unites people from opposite cultures, we may have earned a name for ourselves as being the first generation that can be recognized as spanning the entire globe. It's also obvious to me that these characteristics aren't common with the older generation. We are truly a unique generation.

Spell Center and Linguistics

Kerianne pointed out to me that I haven't posted in a while. Realizing that this is in fact true I've come up with a cohesive topic to write about. Since I've been working on Spell Center for the past 3 months, I'd like to formally introduce it with some explanation for why it's necessary.

Translation projects are often initiated by some sort of linguist, sometimes a PhD candidate looking for a doctoral thesis or some similar situation. These high class intellectuals perform detailed analysis of the language including phonology, morphology and several other words ending in -ology that most normal people never utter.

Often, a written language doesn't yet exist, so linguists have to work with locals to decide what alphabet should be used. Lots of times they choose the alphabet of a trade language, like Thai or English (Latin) because the similarity will make learning the trade language easier. One language project that I've seen in progress started in script very similar to Lanna (Northern Thai), then was converted into Thai, and has currently been converted to Latin letters. This sort of change is sometimes done for political reasons, other times for practical reasons (language learning). Sometimes an entirely new alphabet is designed. Computers make these conversions rather easy, especially if converting amounts to respelling (like ที่น to Tim).

Once the linguist has done initial work and created an alphabet with phonology and grammar, the written language is taught to local people and a translation project begins. SIL has found it most effective to make use of local people for most of the translation. And so computers are introduced to tribal people at an early stage. The translation work is typed into computers (usually running Windows XP and sometimes Mac OSX or Linux) using tools like Paratext and Translator's Workbench developed by farang non-profit organizations.

Enter Spell Center. In trade languages like English, French, and Thai there is usually several dictionaries and word lists available for spell checkers to check against. However, in minority languages, the only list of words is the corpus of work that has been created. In Spell Center (and other apps like Paratext) we parse the entire corpus of work and get a list of all words used. In Spell Center, the user can look through this list of words and decide which ones are spelled correctly and fix the ones that are spelled wrong (pictured to the right).

While existing applications do this already, Spell Center exists so that we can add additional algorithms to help out the translator. For instance, we can make an assertion that if a short word occurs only once or twice (rather than 125 times), its probably a typo and we can mark it wrong. We also allow the translator to be unsure, and use a '?' to come back to later when someone more knowledgeable is available. We also allow the user to see every place where the word was used in the context that it was used in the bottom pane to help them remember the meaning of the word.

We'll be integrating this with an open source application called Enchant (link), which is an engine that can be used to provide spelling suggestions for translation editors and word processors.

After Spell Center comes to a relatively stable place, we can consider extending the functionality to create a concordance very quickly.

A requirement of Spell Center is that it should be easy for new users to learn as it probably won't often be used so much by PhD linguists, but more by local people doing translation work. The interface I have here in the screen shot will actually change quite a bit before it's actually released. The current plan is that I'll have it at a relatively stable place by the beginning of November so that we can try it out on a user and find all those design issues that we never really thought about. I'm quite excited for this stage. It's the time of truth, when I get to find out if all the work I've been doing has been worthwhile, and I get to see it in use. This suddenly isn't some obscure project for school that has no life cycle beyond getting a decent grade, this is actually going to be used by people!

Google Earth

Tonight I became interested in Google Earth and went exploring Chiang Mai. This is quite fun to see where everything is on a realistic looking map. I highly recommend it. Download Google Earth and search for "Chiang Mai, Changwat Chiang Mai Thailand" and it should take you on a flight directly to "my city." Have a look around and do some sight seeing!