Lx=d: SundayResearch

``I don't know how to count zombies in Japanese.'' I voluntarily translate mathematics exercises in Khan academy ( https://www.khanacademy.org/ ) from English to Japanese/German.  You can learn anything on Khan academy. When I translate the following question: Liliana used 4 dark power crystals to raise 14 zombie soldiers. She wants to know how many zombie soldiers (z) she can raise with 10 dark power crystals... In Japanese, when you count, you added postfix depends on what you count. I know how to count people: 1人，2人, 3人. But, is a zombie a person? A zombie could be an animal, then, I should count them 1匹，2匹, 3匹.  Wait, is a zombie a dead body? Then I should count them 1体，2体, 3体. A zombie could be a novel ghost, then 1柱，2柱... The question told me they are zombie soldiers. Soldiers are the same as the people, then 1 人，2人, 3人. In the end, I decided to translate them as 1人，2人, 3人, this means a zombie is a person. I like translation work like this, quite interesting. Y...

Abstract I voluntarily work on for free mathematics material translation for everyone. I have three main tasks in my workflow of this work: 1. script translation on a srt file, 2. dubbing the video, 3. subtitle generation. I found the subtitle timing generation is a time consuming task, so I want to reduce this. When I generate a subtitle, I already have the translated script and its video sound. So, I try to use these data to semi-automate the subtitle timing generation. This time I use the YouTube's transcript function to generate the subtitle timing. This can reduce the time of timing generation task. I implemented a srt file to text file conversion script since YouTube's transcript function requires text format data. YouTube's transcript function performs  not only the timing generation, it also edit the lines (put some newlines). Therefore, I implemented subtitle line concatenation script, too. One experiment shows that whole manual work took 4.5 hours to generate th...

My last blog entry, I briefly talk about what is Scratch. There are ``events'' and that is the trigger of the program. In this article, I would like to talk about one of my students who made a character animation program by Scratch. Scratch provides key events. When I push the right arrow key, then ``right arrow key push event'' is triggered. When that event happened, I add 10 to the x coordinate of the cat. This means, when the right arrow button pushed, the cat move to the right for 10 steps. If I add more programs like the up arrow moves the cat to upper direction, I can control the cat position by the arrow keys. This is a cat control program. Today, my student used a dragon. He wrote the same program with the cat. Then, the cat and the dragon move exactly the same way. Of course they should. A current computer is very fast, very precise, and very stupid. It does only what the developer wrote. My student asked me, how he can make the dragon faster. I answered, i...

I teach Scratch [1] , a computer programming language, to 10 to 12 years old students from last year. Sometimes they show me an interesting creative idea. I would like to write one of them here. Before I explain what my students did, I will explain what is Scratch. First I will explain it in a conceptual way, then with an example. If someone can understand a conceptual explanation, he/she can apply the idea to many cases, but this is a bit difficult since their understanding must be deep. An explanation by example is rather easy to understand since it is shallow, that means you don't know it is still true in other cases. So there is a trade-off. Scratch is a computer language, but also a programming environment.  In the environment, the developer writes event driven programs to control many sprite [2] characters. You can think each sprite character an object. Each event invokes a program and each program runs in parallel. Maybe this explanation doesn't make sense for who...

My closest person offered him a volunteer to fight Ebola. He is just a programmer and neither a doctor nor a nurse, so I wonder what he can do for that. However, the frontline people need not only doctors and nurses, but also support people. He found a position of IT, the frontline people will establish a data center for outbreak and information hub. I asked him, ``Don't you have a fear to do that?'' He answered me, ``I'm scared.'' The Ebola has a high risk of death, 50 to 90% of death ratio once infected. There is no good medicine for it yet. But he thought, the outbreak must be stopped there and must be stopped still we can. He told me he doesn't have any family, so he just felt that he does it better than someone who has a family does. Although he clearly sees what he should do, still his hand was trembled when he pushed the ``send'' button of the application form. For one week just after he sent the form, he continue to think about what he ...

I call a fraction time ``Gap time''. A gap time is for instance, a time I am waiting for my next train, a time I am waiting for someone at a cafe, my commute time, and so on. Everyday I have some fraction time that I need to wait something a bit. I have a volunteer work for translating education materials. I often use this ``gap time'' for it. I'm a lazy person, therefore I could hardly find some amount of continuous time for my volunteer work. I believe if I work hard, I cannot continue it. Thus my strategy is ``don't work hard, do just small amount only, but continue everyday for long time.'' I translate Khan Academy  learning materials and its site to Japanese and German. I could translate English to Japanese alone, but I need some help for German translation. I ask to help for this at the lunch break gap time. When I and my colleagues go to lunch, I ask someone to proofread my translation while we are waiting for our coffee. This is a lunch break...