Earlier today we brought home two little bundles of joy – 5-month-old cats named [edit: Elphie] and Glinda. They are sisters, though they look quite different. Ally has a black and brown tortiseshell pattern with a white spot on her chest, and Glinda is almost completely white with a tortie tail and a few other random streaks. They have been a little crazy and quite skittish but appear to be warming up to us and the house quite nicely. Mother and father are doing well and looking forward to lots of play time, snuggle time, and taking cutesy pictures.

And I am so excited. Really. We’ll see how I feel at this time tomorrow, but right now I’m very excited and feeling competent and ready to go. :)

I spent Wednesday through Friday at school setting up my room (I know I said it was done, but then I went to my study group on Wednesday night and got more good ideas for my room!), going to mind-numbing meetings, and getting to know my fellow teachers better. I should post pictures of my room before the kids trash it… :) On Friday we had a potluck lunch. I was all excited to make something yummy, but the only thing left to sign up for was pasta salad. Sigh. However, I was glad I hadn’t tried to make something special and yummy, because it would have been overshadowed by the CHOCOLATE FOUNTAINS!! Indeed, there were not one, but two chocolate fountains at the potluck, with various yummy things to dip into them. Wow is all I have to say. If only school could be a bunch of grownups hanging out and eating chocolate and making cute posters all the time… :)

I spent Saturday doing my lesson plans for the next week and taking care of some last minute details. Sunday we went to church and cleaned the house, and today I made cookies and Jamie and I went to Starbucks to relax and talk. However, loud people made that impossible, so we went for a walk on the lakefront. And now I feel a little bit like a kid waiting for Christmas to come… I want it to be tomorrow so I can get things started! :)

Here is the recipe for the cookies I made: Chocolate Coffee Toffee Oatmeal cookies (more…)

I guess one of the nice things about a couples-blog is that you have fewer dry spells with both writing. At least that’s the theory. I’m sure I’ll be a hobo-blogger myself sometimes, but for now I’ll tell you “up to what i’ve been” lately at work.

My thesis direction (it’s not a topic until I actually do the formal proposal process) has shifted in the past couple weeks. Before, I had vague designs on exploring self-modeling and emotion. I was having trouble coming up with something that was bounded, testable, and fit in with our project. What does fit in, though, is the design and production of an argumentation environment that actually understands and reasons about the arguments being constructed. It’s not something I’ve dreamed about, but sometimes one must take the opportunities that arise.

Let’s clarify that a bit more. Though yes, I am learning how to argue well (I’ve told Becky she doesn’t need to be too worried :)), the primary focus of this project is to assist in reasoning (a lot of the time via comparison), making connections, and finding examples. Computers can’t make claims and support their arguments. People can. The thing which my software will do that no one’s ever done before is this: When the person creates a claim “X is true of Y” and goes about diagramming the support they have for making that claim, they may use argument schemes like analogy or causation. “X is true of Z and Z is similar to Y.” My software will help the human judge how similar cases are, find other probably-similar cases to consider, and perform validity checking on the argument structure as well.

The field where people might actually do this regularly is intelligence analysis; indeed, the government is the funder of our research. (Why, the National Science Foundation, of course. Why would you ask that?) Analysts must document and cite evidence for their conclusions, and this is exactly something that they need (and two steps up from what they have). I’ll go into more detail about our whole project, the Situation Tracking Testbed, another time if anyone’s interested.

So it looks like I’ll be working on argumentation for the next two years. Maybe I’ll just call it ‘reasoning’ to those it won’t matter to. I’ll work on creating Data one day, but I guess it’d need to be able to argue. :)