I am working on doing some monte carlo simulations. I want to do a particular manipulation n times, but I want to constrain what I do based on three parameters, x, y, and z, which are probability distributions coded as arrays. For example, if I want to run this simulation 1000 times, then 24 should be xayaza, 24 xayazb, 72 xaybzc and so on. My code seems to work right when everything is integers, but not when some of the […] (Read more)

Yesterday I gave a talk in the Linguistics department colloquium series. I like to cover all my bases, so I had a handout and a slide presentation, which were both made from the same LaTeX code. In an earlier post, I briefly discussed using the prosper package for LaTeX to make presentations. A few months ago, I discovered the powerdot package, which is kind of the niece of prosper (cousin of ha-prosper). The syntax and framework is very similar to […] (Read more)

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 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)

Today was the last day of my first meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. It was actually the 155th meeting of the society, and the 4th joint meeting with the Acoustical Society of Japan. Oh, and it was in Hawaii. I have been a member of the ASA for several years now, and have read many articles in its journal, but I have not spent that much time reading journals outside of my subfield. There are 13 subfields at […] (Read more)