W.C. Clark – Saxon Pub
July 2, 2008
I went to hear guitarist and vocalist W.C. Clark at the Saxon Pub in Austin. He’s been called the godfather of Austin blues. He has played with a number of the other big names in Austin blues including Stevie Ray Vaughn. He was born in Austin in 1939. That makes him close to 70 and I was astonished by the energy he had. He played his 1 1/2 hr sets without break–one song seamlessly morphing into the next. At times he would talk to the audience while comping blues patterns. His tunes ranged from standard blues to covers of Stevie Wonder tunes. The Saxon pub was small and his sound system was not overpowering meaning I wasn’t worrying about hearing loss. The sound was balanced well. His quartet consisted of himself on guitar and vocals, a drummer, bass player and a sax/harmonica player. Sadly I don’t know their names. If you are interested in hearing him he has clips on his website and there are some youtube videos. he plays mostly in the Austin & hill country area.
Searching Arabic News Archive
June 24, 2008
I finally finished an initial draft of an online search tool for Arabic news sites. This work is part of the project Cactus: Computational Analysis of Cyber Terrorism against U.S., sponsored by the US Army Development Test Command, White Sand Missile Range. We (our team at New Mexico State University) are spidering a number of Arabic news sites daily. We index the content of these sites using the Indri Indexing and Search tool. We modified the tool slightly so it will perform stemming (Arabic Light 10 stemming) on UTF8 text. Right now we have over 10,000 Arabic documents in our collection and it is growing daily. We still have a problem with detecting duplicate documents and are investigating various methods for detecting duplicate documents in a reasonable amount of time. I currently detect exact duplicates by using the sha1 hash function.
Identifying the source of Arabic documents
June 11, 2008
For the last few months I’ve been working on methods to identify the source of Arabic documents. For example, given a document I would like to identify where it was written (Syria, Libya, Sudan, etc). This task is part of a larger project to identify cyberterrorist threats involving New Mexico Tech, New Mexico State University, and the University of Mary Washington. I have over 4000 Arabic documents from 5 different newspapers. Most of the documents are around 15-25k in size. My method uses the sequential minimal optimization algorithm to train a support vector machine. I have been evaluating the approach using 10 fold cross validation and have been getting over 99% classification accuracy. I am currently working on writing several papers on this. As soon as I have a paper accepted I will post it here.
Praire Home Companion – Pan Am Center
June 1, 2008
This week I went to hear a Praire Home Companion at the Pan American Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico (you can listen to that show here). I can say that radio does not do justice to the quality of the regular musicians on the show. Maybe its how they mix or compress the show for radio, but the live performance is much more vibrant. Guest artists included the phenomenal vocal duo Sorela consisting of two sisters, D’ette and D’anna from Albuquerque. They sung songs both in Spanish and English and the audience at the Pan Am Center loved them for good reason. Also appearing were Joe Ely and Joel Guzman both from Austin. Joe Ely is a singer/guitarist and Joel is an extraordinary accordionist–totally mind-blowing. The biggest crowd pleaser of the evening was Chris Thile singing “El Paso”.
Victor Wooten – State Theater
March 29, 2008
Yesterday I attended a concert by Victor Wooten at the State Theater in Falls Church. I purchased tickets over the web. Since there was open seating I got in an already fairly long line at 6:30 (the doors opened at 7). The concert started at 9 so that was a 2 and a half hour wait, but it was well worth it. Victor Wooten was simply astonishing. For those who don’t know him, he plays electric bass. He won “Bass Player of the Year” from Bass Player Magazine three consecutive times (no one else has one it more than once). His technique is beyond anything I ever heard, but he is also amazingly expressive and musical. This concert certainly was one of the best concerts I have ever been to. If you never heard him I would recommend checking him out on youtube.
This fall he will be touring with Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller.
2010 Ron Zacharski