i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I apparently got cookied for a Google experiment that removes the long-running "I'm feeling lucky" button. Interestingly, it also defaults to removing nearly all elements from the page - the only remaining items are the Google logo, a search box, and the words "Press Enter to Search." A mouse-over brings back some links, minus the "I'm feeling lucky" option. See the pictures for details.

Apparently this launched back in May, but I just noticed it when playing around with Google for this week's discussion.

The "wonder-wheel" takes the input query as the center of the wheel and produces a set of expansions and related terms as petals. Clicking on a related term moves out from the origin node and shows a new set of expansions - the original node shrinks in size and gets fainter. You can repeat this multiple times to branch out over a conceptual space. Search results show on the left (where the ads normally are). Here's a sample search for flower:

Interesting post about how India’s days of vertical growth in outsourcing are coming to an end.  Why?  As Andrew McAfee noted in his talk “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” yesterday, IT systems are getting smarter and more powerful, allowing customers to interact directly with systems, and increasingly, systems interacting directly with other systems.

Every bleeping bean, indeed.

Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2009

"In Tax Case, 4 Days Save Robertson $27 Million"

This article might not be available to you if you aren't a subscriber (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125729222815826639.html#mod=todays_us_mo...) so I'll summarize it.

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/annals/extras/cardsvol24...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3688900.html

Inventor Wayne L. Wanous might be surprised that his invention, the APPARATUS FOR SORTING AND RETRIEVING CARDS, was mentioned in Bob's class today.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3688900.pdf

As context, there was a question in class regarding whether IR systems existed before the computer. Evidently, old-timey librarians had been at it for quite some time.

From what I could find, I believe the origins of what we call IR could be credited to Herman Hollerith (February 29, 1860 – November 17, 1929). He was the first to develop a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data. He was the founder of the company that became IBM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Hollerith

Until 2008, the Library of Congress offered a "digital interlibrary loan" service, where materials too fragile to circulate were scanned and delivered via the Web.  It looks as though the program's funding was cut, so you can't browse a full title list, but they still provide a selection of fragile items which are in the public domain, including one of the oldest examples of bike porn.

 In a blog post about the birth of the img tag in HTML, Mark Pilgrim reiterates the point made by Tim Bray about new languages and their evolution.  (emphasis mine) - 

A feature that I'd really like in a search engine (or wikipedia or even the bowser itself) would be to be able to see a visual representation of the path i traced - i.e. the queries that i gave and the links that i clicked on.

Maybe this is the same company Bob mentioned in lecture today. Either way, is this applicable to the context in which it was mentioned?

http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/10/30/04

Once again, public radio to the rescue.

Have been running into this link repeatedly these days - a flowchart rendition of the song Hey Jude.

A lot of people I know and don't know seem to love this flow chart. I wonder why?

Is it just an interesting and novel way to look at a song lyric, do we (as humans) like things better when simplified for us - broken down into steps, do we really like our things, even pieces of art, organised?

 This article is funny and sad at the same time. Someone working for PepsiCo misplaced some paperwork regarding a lawsuit against the company.. so Pepsi failed to send a representative to the trial, letting the plaintiffs win by default... to a sum of $1.26 billion dollars.

http://consumerist.com/5392454/misplaced-letter-costs-pepsico-126-billio...

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.&#16

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just decided to allow top-level domains to be written in Unicode rather than ASCII, which will for the first time enable a full URL to be constructed out of non-Latin characters, which should improve accessibility for users in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.  It will also open up a new trove of domains to register; some Icann officials claim there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use.