Derrick Higgins
I have finally gotten around to updating this page, after a long hiatus, mainly because I have discovered that Google has stopped indexing me. What's up, Google? Show me some love!
I'm hoping that changing the information around a little will get me some more web cred, because I am tired of finishing second to that Clemson basketball guy in the "Derrick Higgins" search sweepstakes.
...So anyhow, if you managed to find this page, and I am, in fact, the Derrick Higgins you are looking for, here's what's up with me:
- I am now living in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, and am finally settling in a little bit after spending a year working on our house to make it habitable. After a year's experience, I now understand enough about home improvement to appreciate what a poor job I did on a number of projects.
- I'm a computational linguist at ETS in Princeton, NJ. So I devise ways of processing test responses such as essays and snippets of speech automatically. This might include automatic scoring, providing feedback about how the response might be improved, and weeding out responses that look suspicious.
- I waste a good deal of my free time playing chess. I have not yet found the time to check out the Philly chess scene much, but when the weather gets nicer, you can expect to find me playing a few games in Love Park.
- Check out Arika Okrent's page. She has recently published an article in the American Scholar entitled A Visit To Esperantoland, and will be following up with more juicy tales from the subcultures of invented languages. Pretty cool stuff...and I'm not jsut talking it up because she's my wife.
- Leo Okrent Higgins is the fruit of our union. He updates his web site a lot more often than I do, so you should bookmark him, rather than me.
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PS--Feel free to link to this site. Maybe you can help me convince Google that I'm worth indexing after all!
derrick@wickedoasis.org