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...

 So there was some debate over whether translating back and forth between languages is a fair assessment of a translation system, but I definitely find it entertaining. Translation Party repeatedly translates a phrase between English and Japanese until an equilibrium has been established. For example, "May the force be with you" is eventually transformed into "One of the other five have one or two months and one single-supply one."

This looks like fun... http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/lec/LEC/Evolution_Experiment.html

Language creation like a big game of "telephone". How could such a quick (not over generations, and translations) evolution affect translations and organization?

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.

CNN article: English getting its millionth word [...]

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One million words! Wow. Since English is not my native language, having to catch up with roughly 995.000 more words is not really good news for me. But then, how do you count the words that comprise a language? How do you define "a word"? What is "a word"?

According to the article, linguists state that

True Engineering Technology is going a step further from just tagging links, photos or files, they're tagging individual pieces of data. This short article from Technology Review touches briefly on the importance of associating context with information, the technology being used, and whether it's worth the effort to organize information in this way.

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts