Subject: Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions?

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 08:49:52 -0700

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 02:37:49AM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> At 11:07 PM 8/12/01 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > > I want to make sure to note that people who use LogFlash are helping the
> > > research aspect of the project.
> >
> >Uhh, really? No offense intended, but perhaps then it should exist in
> >a form that can actually be used by most people.
> 
> Meaning?

Dude, it's a _DOS_ program. In a highly proprietary form of _pascal_.
It's completely useless to a number of people on this list, including
me.

> > > LogFlash is instrumented, and anyone like Arnt who makes it
> > > through all the words is urged to send me the files specific to
> > > their name. Info on the learner's education and language
> > > background (especially with regard to the 6 source languages for
> > > Lojban gismu, is also useful.
> >
> ><sigh> I can't believe I'm saying this.
> >
> >If you explain in more detail why Logflash is important, and I agree
> >with the value as presented in said explanation, I'll give serious
> >consideration to re-writing it.
> 
> Rewriting it? Why?

See above.

> LogFlash is instrumented to log the user's sessions, and also keeps
> statistics on how many hits and errors that the user has in learning
> each word. This is the first cut for research as to whether the
> recognition scores used to make Lojban words actually mean anything in
> terms of learnability. If we get any correlation with a small
> self-selected and haphazardly learning set of users, then we likely
> would want to repeat the experiment more systematically with new users
> (and probably modify the instrumentation based on what we found in the
> first pass).
> 
> Such a second-level research effort would be specific and focussed in
> the way no other Loglan/Lojban research has been, could be described
> in terms that do not limit applicability to learning only Lojban, and
> hence could be eligible for grant funding from some organization that
> funds academic research in second language learning. This of course
> would build the Loglan project's credibility in the scientific
> research arena, credibility that is hard for any artificial language
> research to gain.

OK.

> >Is the research value 'tainted' if the user has done other, seperate
> >memorizing of the words?
> 
> Such a taint is real, but at this point I suspect that tainted data is
> better than no data. Words that someone has learned before using
> LogFlash will "go right to the top" with no errors, and this could be
> filtered out, leaving us the rest of the data to analyze.

<nod>

> A secondary goal is to statistically demonstrate the effectiveness of
> the LogFlash algorithm. While you and others have at times thought
> poorly of it for varying reasons, LogFlash is an automation of JCB's
> flashcard algorithm, which he apparently devised after conducting his
> own serious research into flashcard methods to find what worked best.
> LogFlash is thus (presumably) tuned for optimal learning.

Optimal learning of the whole set, maybe, but not of subsets.

> BTW, it IS possible to use LogFlash with a subset of the words, by
> running a weeded gismu list through a little program that builds the
> index that the program uses. Not sure how good this would be for the
> research purposes (if only because analyzing the data would need a
> smarter program that could match the instrumentation data to actual
> words rather than to line number in the gismu list), but it does avoid
> one of your criticisms.

Ah, OK.

-Robin

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/