Stuart's Life in Thailand

The last post on this website from three months ago promised some iOS apps for learning Thai language, and we finally have something to show for our hard work. I am really happy with the way that our first app has turned out. It is basically a mobile version of the ITS4Thai website. But being able to hold the courses in your hand and touch the Thai words with your hands really adds a whole new dimension to learning Thai. We hope everyone loves it as much as we do!

Here's a video showing how the iPad version works:

And here's the link to the App on the App Store:

itunes.apple.com/us/app/its4thai-language-conversation/id525299731

We actually released the first version about a month ago, and have made steady progress with a new release every week that adds new features and improves on the UI. And we aren't done yet. Stay tuned!

It's the first Monday in April, which means that my company is back in business again. After not having any staff for a couple of years, I finally hired two of my students from Phuket to come work for me for a few months to build some iPhone apps, and today was our first day together in our new office.

We started this morning by putting together the desks and chairs that I had bought and transported from IKEA in Bangkok. Then, I gave out some programming assignments to build some prototype apps, and I started working on the Project Plan and Use Cases for the first app we will build.

Looking back through my files, I see that I originally started drawing up plans for this app back in September 2009. The plans still look good, so hopefully by say, the end of May 2012, we will have something available on the iOS App Store. I have lots of ideas for other iPhone and/or iPad apps, so I should be able to keep my programmers very busy.

So needless to say I am very excited to finally taking another shot at the company and the app ideas. Let's see how things work out over the next few months before my classes start up again in July.

Today was the last day of my first semester as a PhD student at KMUTT. For the last four months I have been taking two courses: Research Methods and Theories of Language Learning. Both have been great. When I think back over all of the topics we covered -- from psychology to education to linguistics to educational software and more -- I am amazed at everything I have learned. And as is usually the case, the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

The Research Methods class was one I definitely needed. My undergraduate and masters degree were both in technical fields, so this is my first time to really focus on a liberal arts subject. I learned a lot about how to do research as an "Applied Linguist". Even though I won't ever use most of what I learned, it was an eye opening experience to see all the different ways that the research can be approached.

And I have really enjoyed thinking about how to organize, plan, and conduct research into Applied Linguistics areas. I am enjoying the process of figuring out what my dissertation topic should be (even though it's a bit frustrating at times), and I especially love to hear what research others are doing, and making suggestions to them about how to approach things.

The Theories of Language Learning course was also fascinating. Part of the reason I wanted to study in this field was to try to get an understanding of why learning a language is so difficult for everyone. And wow, now I see just how complex it really is! It looks like my dissertation will be exploring some of this complexity and hopefully uncovering some relationships between various linguistic features and perhaps providing some insight about the best way to learn a language.

But even though I have thoroughly enjoyed the last four months, I am definitely looking forward to a break from class. Not that it's going to be a real break -- I have a huge list of things to accomplish over these next three months, including two more assignments that need to be finished for class over the next two weeks.

But I am really, really looking forward to being back in Phuket and finally accomplishing a few goals I have had for years. I'll share more about these exciting tasks later...

Some of the work I have been doing lately at school has had an aspect of analyzing "reading level" -- or how difficult some text is to read and understand. One research project I am involved with is creating some reading comprehension tests, and we wanted to find good copyright-free text at our student's reading level that we could use on the test. And one of my class assignments is also about analysing text to determine how complex it is.

So the other day I was just using Google as usual to search for something, and I saw an interesting feature that sorts results based on the reading levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. I can't find much information on how this filter works, but it seems to deliver good results. I did a search on the word "quokka" and this is what I found:

Beginning Level:

The Quokka is a marsupial from brushy areas in southwestern Australia. It is a small wallaby, a type of kangaroo. Quokkas can hop with their powerful legs and walk on all four limbs. Their life span is about 5 years in captivity.(1)

Advanced Level:

The quokka (Setonix brachyurus), the only member of the genus Setonix, is a small macropod about the size of a domestic cat. Like other marsupials in the macropod family (such as the kangaroos and wallabies), the quokka is herbivorous and mainly nocturnal. It can be found on some smaller islands off the coast of Western Australia, in particular on Rottnest Island just off Perth and Bald Island near Albany.(2)

I'd have to agre that's a pretty big difference in reading levels!

By the way, that last quote came from Wikipedia, so I was wondering what the reading level for Wikipedia is in general. Doing a search for "site:en.wikipedia.org/wiki" shows these results:

The supposedly "Simple" Wikipedia website doesn't show much difference, according to Google:

So then I wondered how this website stacks up:

Hmmm...

So then I wondered when those few "Intermediate" level posts were, so I checked by month and this is what I found.

This seems to show that I was writing at a higher level in 2006-2008 than I was at the years before and afterwards.

What does this mean? Since I can't figure out what Google is using to rank these pages, I can't tell. The only thing I can find from a Google employee is that

The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.(3)

But perhaps a more detailed analysis is needed. Which is exactly what I am doing for the class assignment I mentioned at the start of this post. Stay tuned!

References

(1) Quokka article at Enchanted Learning

(2) Quokka article on Wikipedia

(3) Google Product Forums

It looks like Google Street View has finally been released in Thailand. I'm not sure how much coverage they have, but at least Bangkok and Phuket (my two homes) are done. It's interesting too, that in Phuket, the Street View is much more current than the actual map. The neighborhood that I live and work in was built in the last two years. On the Google Map it shows up as a big dirt field. But in Street View, all of the buildings in the neighborhood are finished already.

I was alerted to this by a former student at PSU who is now a Street View Superstar. There are two pics of him on his motorcycle coming out from his apartment on the main road. He said that he doesn't remember seeing the camera truck, but he is definitely noticing it in these pictures!

I noticed that his face is blurred in this pic, and so is the headlight of his motorcycle. So I guess Google has a face detection algorithm that blurs anything face-shaped. I wonder what it will do with advertisements.

There you go. If you ever see the Google Street View truck and you don't want your face to be blurred, then be sure to hide behind some electrical wires!

I just realized that last week was my 9 Year Anniversary for moving to Thailand. I arrived August 1, 2002, and what a wild ride it has been since then!

Of course a lot has changed over the past nine years. I have changed physically, emotionally, and mentally. My day-to-day life has changed. Even Thailand has changed.

These last couple of months have been especially busy for me, so I haven't had much time to reflect on these changes lately. But coming up later this year will probably be another big change for me. Blogging on my own website seems almost old-fashioned in these modern Twitter and Facebook days. But maybe I should start visiting my old friend sgtowns.com and sharing my experiences and thoughts again as I move into a new phase of my life...

ผมเป็นอาจารย์ที่ ม.อ.ภูเก๊ต
อาทิตย์นี้นักศึกษากำลังทำข้อสอบ
เมื่อวานนี้นักศึกษาของผมทำข้อสอบ Data Structures
วันนี้ผมรับข้อสอบและพรุ่งนี้ผมจะเริ่มตรวจ
ผมเอาข้อสอบไม่ง่ายเกินไปและไม่ยากเกินไปด้วย
ผมหวังพวกเขาทำเก่ง

เมื่อคืนผมเล่นแบดมินตันกับเพือนเจ็ดคน
เราเล่นทุกวันอังคารและพฤหัส
ชอบเล่นมากมากแต่เมื่อคืนผมเจ็บแขน
ผมคิดว่าเล่นครั้งหน้าไม่ได้
ผมหวังว่าผมดีขึ้นเร็วๆ

Even though you wouldn't know it by reading this website, life goes on here in beautiful Thailand. I am nearing the end of my first semester teaching Thai students in my new hometown, and all in all it has been a good experience. I know I have learned a lot of new Thai vocabulary, and I hope my students have learned a word or two of English as well.

When I taught in Bangkok, there was always a problem of students answering their cell phones during my lecture. I hated it when this happened, and would usually stop talking and stare at the student until they hung up. I always thought it was very rude to take a call in class. Luckily, I have yet to see this problem at my current school. Perhaps the students are more polite. Or perhaps all of their friends are in the class with them already.

In any case, I can't help but share this hilarious video. I won't spoil the ending... so just watch it!

Hmm... three posts in three days. What's going on here?

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I have been doing a ton of paperwork to become both a teacher and a student. This work is still on-going, and today another piece of the puzzle fell into place: my graduate school diploma arrived in the mail from North Carolina.

That's right, both the school I was applying to teach and the school I was applying to study wanted a copy of my college diploma. Needless to say, I did not include my diploma in my packing list when I moved to Thailand. In fact, I am not even sure where it is. It's somewhere in my parent's basement, I am guessing. So I sent off for a new copy more than a month ago and now three weeks after it was shipped and $40 later, it has arrived.

Getting started with the two separate schools has been confusing. I get phone calls from "the university" or Dr. So-and-So asking for some kind of paperwork and I have no idea which school or which professor it is. I also now have 2 new university ID's (one faculty and one student) and 2 new passwords to access the university network and 2 new email addresses (with 2 more passwords).

As far as the emails go, normally I sign up for everything using the "sgtowns" handle. You can find "sgtowns" @gmail @yahoo @hotmail @facebook @twitter, @amazon, etc. Sometimes for work I'll be given a stuart.towns@___ or an stowns@___. But this time I was granted a new one: stuart.gt@___. And every email I get now from my new school is addressed to Mr. Stuart Grant. I keep thinking my mother is calling me...

Oh and the fact that I now have 4 new passwords, reminds me about a new software that I have been using and really love: 1Password. It keeps all of my passwords for all of my logins in one place, and with a combination of DropBox, I can access these passwords any time anywhere. So how many password-protected Internet accounts do I have at the moment? FIFTY-EIGHT. And every password is unique. How the heck was I able to remember 58 passwords before?

And in the spirit of yesterday's video posting, here's a short clip that gave me a chuckle after a long day in the office and a two hour lecture. Enjoy...