So my current research focuses heavily on confusion, specifically phonetic confusions. For my disseration, I play people words mixed with noise, and ask them to type what they hear. Then I look at the types of mistakes they make. For example, pit and kit are often confused with one another, but pit and lit are not, because [p] and [k] have very similar acoustic properties, whereas [p] and [l] are not very similar. I often wonder why I have chosen […] (Read more)

I just discovered a nice gallery of pgf examples. This is a figure from Rumelhart and McClelland 1986 showing the structure of their model of parallel distributed processing. I am posting this example there, and here as well. First of all the picture: And next the latex code: (notice the foreach loops – very cool!!!) \documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{arrows} \begin{document} \begin{figure*}[htbp] \centering \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.8,cap=round] % Styles \tikzstyle{information text}=[text badly centered] % The graphic \begin{scope} \pgfsetarrowsend{stealth'} \pgfsetlinewidth{1pt} \draw (1,.9) -- (1,1.8) node[below=.9cm,text width=3cm,style=information […] (Read more)

So I am starting to use the pgf package for graphics in LaTeX, because it rocks. The biggest thing is that it is compatible with both postscript and pdf output, which is very nice. I have been using mostly pdftex lately, because it means a faster compile time, and has other features like advanced typography (more on that in a different post). I have also been toying around with XeTeX, which allows one to use any old font with latex, […] (Read more)

I have been working on a new LaTeX class file for University of Michigan dissertations for awhile now. I finally got tired of the limitations of umdiss.cls. The main goals (which I believe I have achieved) of the new class file are: load the book class and modify only what’s necessary be compatible with as many packages as possible require the hyperref package, because it does many very handy things, like automatically creating pdf bookmarks and links from the table […] (Read more)

I recently found a very nice site about the beauty of LaTeX. It does a close comparison of the type of output you get with LaTeX as opposed to what you normally get with a program like Microsoft Word. There is also another nice article that it links to near the bottom comparing hyphenation using several different typesetting and word-processing programs. I will let you read about the rest yourself: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex