i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

Just heard about this project, the total scope of which seems outside of 202 (but is still fascincating): the MediaBugs project (http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/11/how-do-we-categorize-all-journalistic...) hopes to be a fact- and system-checking process similar to bug tracking in software development.

The most 202-ish aspect of this is their call for help in categorization:

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Lake v. City of Phoenix that as law dictates for public records disclosure (as it does in Phoenix), when public records are requested, even if they are in an electronic format, they must be provided and must include the metadata. From the decision:

In Lecture today, Bob made a point about the gap between humans & computers ability to sense and describe an object... and that a 3-year old is able to perform better (in terms of recognizing objects) than any computer.  But what about Facial Recognition software?

Facial Recognition software has been heavily invested in for a long time... perhaps we will move beyond recognizing faces to recognizing objects?

"The odds an adult believes there is a chance that Elvis Presley is still alive are 1 in 12.5". Answer to, is Elvis Presley alive? Website called "book of odds" is answering questions like these using semantic search. Its about applying semantic technology to simpler much simpler problem. Read further details in follwing article:

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/10/12/daily23.html

Book of Odds: http://www.bookofodds.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11unboxed.html

While I was working on last IO Lab project on Metacrap, I read an interesting interview given by Cory Doctorow on Wired. He talks about Flickr tags and metacrap. It also gives good insights on the problems of explicit metadata. This interview was given in 2007.

Link: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/05/metacrap_and_fl/

"Decay" is one of the most popular tags on Flickr. Shocking.. isn't it? Do read that part.

I'll see Jess's game show and raise with my bid of The Starlost. Which I thought was pretty damn spiffy when I was a kid.

Cory Doctorow's example of misspellings on Ebay like "plam pilot" reminded me of the site Fat Fingers. The site lets you search for a common term, and it returns an Ebay search that includes common typos. It looks like Fat Fingers doesn't think "plam pilot" is the likely misspelling; it lists palm piot, palmpilot, and pal piot.

Many linguists worry about the loss of linguistic diversity  -- since languages, like species, are currently threatened with extinction at alarming rates, due to rapid changes in the way humans live.