i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

"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/

This 4 minute video, created by Dr. Michael Wesch for a class on digital ethnography, became really popular on youtube a couple of years back. It talks about - (really effectively!) - why and what is XML, XML vs HTML, social tagging, and several other pertinant 202 topics in the context of web 2.0.

If you have any doubts about XML vs HTML, do watch this!

202 in the Whitehouse:  a selection from Obama's recent email communications from guardian.co.uk on 10/26:

Quoted Text --------------------------------------------

To: VPOTUS <joe.biden@whitehouse.gov>

Re: Fwd: "Jonas Bros music never been used in torture, except maybe here in the White House" Hilarious stuff!!!

Yeah, I've read it Joe. I'm the one who sent it to you. You see the thing at the top where it says "Fr: POTUS"? That means me. Barack

-------------------------------------------- End Quoted Text

A number of the slides have been posted as non-searchable PDFs. Since I find it useful to be able to search/highlight/annotate PDFs, I've been running them through an OCR tool for my own use. With Bob's permission, I've uploaded the OCR'd versions, in case this would be useful for others:

http://drop.io/202slides
password='meaningisuse'

A thread on a discussion forum today was about tin foil. Tons of people say tin foil, yet it hasn't been made of tin since the middle of the 20th Century. But for some reason that made me think of "Saran Wrap" and how that's a more common term than "plastic wrap" even though it is a name brand.

 I was looking up Reommind, one of the companies at the career fair from yesterday, and low and behold they have a software platform offering automatic categorization of enterprise documents based on context as their stored.  hmmm this sounds an awful lot like semantic classification to me. 

Check it out: http://www.recommind.com/technology/core

Via language log, this metadata mix-up in Google Scholar is kind of entertaining: 

During my search, I encountered the following citation (direct from Google Scholar to you):

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

After I stopped laughing, I set to figuring out what was going on.

A recent study in Germany suggests that non-traditional first names are correlated with poor academic performances and bad behavior.

Surprisingly, at least for Americans, is the particularly poor performance associated with the name "Kevin". I've known some bad Jeffs, and even a few sketchy Erics, but Kevin? This guy?

(No, there's no need to verify Bob's ID at the next class.)

Having received a misaddressed email from a classmate recently, I was delighted to see this new Gmail feature from Google Labs.  It might be just the ticket for solving what they refer to as the "Got The Wrong Bob" problem: even a unique identifier like an email address doesn't help when misapplied.

It looks like structured product labeling hasn't been enough to make the prescription labeling process a smooth system.