Wednesday, November 16

[soid]

 A day of lots of back and forth, little satisfaction.

In the morning, I discovered the overnight training process was barely learning anything. I figure out my model picked up an old tokenizer vocabulary. 

1pm I called Song. I was hoping to find a group of students in the room, but he was alone, and sounded a bit sick, and I didn't want to bother him too much. So I asked something and left.

2-4pm NLG seminar. Multilingual text summarization. Then there was a presenter from Amazon talking about books summarization that concluded saying if you care more or less about quality, the-state-of-the-art models are not yet anywhere near of anything useful in this area (Rouge scores lower than 20).

4-5pm OH with Prof. McKeown. We looked a lot into how much the BLEU score sucked, then talked a bit about KL-annealing for auto-encoders. 

6-8pm Disclosure movie at Miller's theater (a 2020 Netflix documentary); it was part of transgender awareness week. The movie shows many examples of transgender bias in Hollywood films. Starting with Meet me at the Fountain (1904), to the present. They say trans men are usually not visible and mostly ignored by society, even thought the split of trans men/women is about 50/50. Trans women are very much discriminated in society. The documentary looks at transgender representations in Hollywood films, where trans women typically presented either as creeps or villains (Psycho by Hitchcock), or someone to laugh at (examples from Jim Carry), or emotionally unstable (a cool looking movie that I didn't catch). I was a bit confused by this criticism because in feminist movies these villain-unstable woman depiction is very much centrally aimed at destroying the patriarchal society (e.g. Smithereens, 1982). Then I got it – women in old American movies are always good wives serving breakfast, so depicting a weird woman which is unstable, trying things, fails miserably, like in Smithereens, it is part of showing what gender independence means – it is not always about success; however, it doesn't work for trans women of which society has this completely opposite view, as weirdos, and many of whom just rather want a calm life. Anyway, it's interesting, though I think the movie could be deeper. It doesn't show, for example, good trans depictions. It mentions Paris Is Burning, which I hope to watch some day, especially that it depicts the ballroom culture. But it also ignores many other good movies which got it right, in my humble opinion: Tangerine, for example, is just great, and Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Another surprising thing that they mentioned is that a lot of trans women hate comes from gay men – I wonder why (perhaps, being seen as quirky they don't want to be associated with even bigger "weirdos" from the point view of society?), but interesting, it seems LGBTQ+ community is really quite unstable, people have different backgrounds and sexual preferences is not everything, I bet for many in LGBTQ+ it's rather a headache that they have to deal with their identity issues. But it is an important example of how this community politically organizes despite all differences and achieves political changes for the benefit of everyone.

In the evening I read some Khalidi's Sowing Crisis. He promises to explain the Cold War competition trends in examples of three wars: Israeli-Palestinian, Lebanon civil war, and Iraq-Iran war in the 80s. His argument is along the line that the superpowers had never pursued an ideological aim, but they were trying to gain advantage for its own often illusive benefit. Then I was spacing out and stopped reading it, and went to bed.