Education and Events: PGDay/MED 2023, Clozemaster, Shiny in Production
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PGDay/MED Schedule and Registration
We are pleased to announce that we have finalized the schedule for PGDay/MED 2023! We were fortunate enough to get a large number of submissions, and the program committee is proud of the line-up that we’re featuring for this first-ever Mediterranean PGDay.
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Building a DIY Clozemaster
A friend introduced me to Clozemaster, which is a very simple concept: you get two sentences, one in English, another in French, and one of the words is a Cloze deletion. You have to figure out what goes in the blank. You’re testing vocabulary, grammar, and, since the blank can appear in either sentence, you’re testing in both directions. But Clozemaster has an absolutely demonic UX: the font is this ridiculous, unserious, 8 bit font literally from Super Mario Bros.; pasted over some tired Bootstrap theme. And the free version is limited to 30 sentences a day.
So I looked for ways to build my own language learning flashcards for use with Mochi. I found some French frequency lists, and thought to use that to learn vocabulary, but vocabulary alone is not useful. Then I found a list of English-French sentence pairs, ranked by frequency; but the corpus is OpenSubtitles, so the vocabulary is very skewed to movie dialogue. And then I found Tatoeba: an open-source database of sentences and their translations.
The rest of this post is a walkthrough of the Python code I wrote to generate Cloze flashcards from Tatoeba sentence pairs.
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Shiny in Production 2023: Workshops
Shiny in Production is returning to the Catalyst this October! Our workshop lineup has now been finalised, and our first two speakers are confirmed. If you want to read more about the speakers, or register for the conference, head over to the website. Early bird tickets are now on sale!
For the workshops this year, we see the return of the extremely popular Introduction to Posit (formerly RStudio) Connect, as well as a two new shiny-centered topics.