Downtown?

This looks like the old downtown area of any Georgia (or eastern U.S.) town, built in the 1880s to 1920s.

But it's actually a row of storefronts in Watkinsville, Georgia, built less than a year ago; most of them have not yet been occupied.

Melody pointed out one sure sign of non-authenticity: They're all built with the same kind of brick.

(Cell phone photo, Nokia 6085.)

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Highly recommended book

I highly recommend Steven Bird et al.'s new book about the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). In fact, I plan to use it as a textbook, even though it competes with one I wrote myself (for a somewhat different target audience) a few years ago.

As NLP textbooks go, this one has two special features: (1) it is based on Python and the NLTK, and does not presume any programming experience; (2) it uses the most modern tools, including taggers, Bayesian classifiers, and parsers, and includes them, ready-to-use, in the free software package.

Python is a programming language that is designed to be powerful but easy to learn. The NLTK is a collection of data and software components for processing human language.

In teaching NLP, I face two challenges. The computer science students are impatient with the details of English; they wish the language could be redesigned to suit their software, or they write software that just ignores what looks messy (e.g., ignoring sentence structure and losing the distinction between "dog bites man" and "man bites dog"). The linguists don't want to do much programming; what they really want is application software.

This book caters slightly more to linguists than to computer scientists, although I think I can use it with a mixed class of both. (I'll add some linguistics material for the CS people.) The book is slightly weak on algorithms, but, realistically, it contains as much content as a person can take in during a single semester, and unlike other "information retrieval" books, it doesn't shy away from parsing and semantics. Students can proceed to more advanced books later.

What is important is that until now there hasn't been an accessible, introductory book focusing on the most modern tools. This book will familiarize beginners with current practices.

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Still want a monitor that isn't widescreen?

If you still want a computer monitor with the conventional (4:3) width-to-height ratio instead of the new "widescreen" type, you can still buy them from Dell, and I just ordered a pair of 19-inchers.

I use a video card that drives two monitors. That is apparently what power users did about three years ago, before everybody went widescreen. The fact is, two conventional 19-inch monitors give you more screen space than a widescreen 24-inch, and besides, you can maximize a window in either of them while leaving the other one free. Apparently, in the widescreen world, people no longer maximize windows.

[Addendum:] Wider is not bigger. An old-style 19-inch monitor is 1280×1024 pixels. A widescreen 19-inch is 1440×900 pixels. It's wider but not as high, and the total screen area is slightly less. To get a screen that is 1024 pixels high (or nominally 1080), you need (I think) a 24-inch widescreen monitor.

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Mystery calls from
Healthcare Fiscal Management, 800-425-0435

[Updated.] This entry is written mainly for people who are looking for 800-425-0435 using a search engine. Here's the scoop...

We have been receiving recorded telephone messages (from Caller ID 800-425-0435) telling us to call the financial department of a local hospital. Sharon and I have both had minor procedures done at that hospital recently (the earliest on June 5) and, prior to that, had had no dealings with them for many years.

On calling the financial department, on one occasion they couldn't tell us what it was about, and on another, they didn't even answer.

Googling the number, I find that it belongs to Healthcare Fiscal Management, Inc. (HFMI) and there are multiple allegations of nuisance calls from this number, some of them violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

What are they calling me about? Surely not about my bill? I have not received a bill from this hospital yet (and it's not time to; the activity started less than a month ago; I've received some insurance paperwork but not a final bill). Maybe they're peddling a time-payment scheme.

All I know is, it's rude (as well as useless) to ring my telephone repeatedly and not have a human being on the line or a definite message for me.

And it's completely wacky to start trying to collect a bill by telephone before the paper bill has even been sent out.

I called an executive at the hospital and brought all this to their attention. They are sending HFMI a stiff warning and may stop using their services. They are going to send me the bills on paper, and then, if everything is in order, I'll pay them.

Personally, I would like to see a complete ban on machine-originated phone calls to humans, regardless of the business relationship. Autodialers make it too easy to be discourteous to thousands of people at a time.

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Gleanings from the financial news

Melody's graphic design business is off to a good (re)start, but (as you might guess) after one day there's still room for more clients, so let us know if you need anything.

Contrary to the whining we've been hearing, credit-card companies will still make plenty of money under the new regulations.

But what's better than a credit or debit card? Using your cell phone as a bank. That's the hot new idea in Third World countries. Maybe you don't have a bank account, but you've prepaid for your cell phone — it has money credited to it — and it's good at secure communication. And it can be disabled instantly if you report it stolen. So the obvious idea is to allow merchants to accept transfers from your cell phone account, delivered through the cell phone itself.

Meanwhile, it now appears that as many as 5% of the £1 coins in England are counterfeit. I was alarmed back when it was reported to be 2%.

This reminds me of the great Portuguese banknote scandal, where counterfeiting systematically inflated the currency. And it also sounds like an obstacle to the widespread adoption of $1 coins in the U.S., which I strongly favor.

Of more immediate concern: A large group of digital-camera sellers in Brooklyn have been punished for deceptive sales tactics. I'm glad they were caught and punished; some of them have been notorious for years. Never buy from a web site without checking out the company's reputation. In the New York area, sound-alike names are a problem: 47th Street Photo was a very reputable camera dealer in the 1960s and 1970s; 42nd Street Photo is a separate outfit that I know little about; and 86th Street Photo is one of the new Brooklyn bad guys.

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Don't run Indexing Service on a roaming user profile server

At the lab, we store every user's profile (desktop and application settings) on a central server, from which it is copied back and forth to whatever workstation the user is sitting at. We'd had sporadic problems with profiles not getting copied back to the server at logoff (resulting in an error message to that effect).

The culprit is the Windows Indexing Service. It was holding files open while the logoff process neded to write on them. I turned off the Indexing Service using both services.msc and Group Policy, and the problem went away. (Setting the Profiles folders to be un-indexable would have been harder because the administrator doesn't have the right to change their attributes.)

We also had some failures in the other direction — profile couldn't be copied to the workstation — because a copy of it was already there and, oddly, the user didn't have write permission on some of the files in it.

Speaking of roaming user profiles, if logons and logoffs are slow, look for junk in your profile. Log on, go to "Run...", type "%appdata%", and see what comes up (making sure hidden folders and files are visible). One unfortunate user had 150 megabytes of unwanted, obsolete iPod firmware upgrades.

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