i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google introduced a number of new features today, most notably real-time updates and searching by an uploaded photo. Real-time updates means that Twitter and Facebook statuses will immediately feed to Google search.

A recent article from the BBC, "Great Writers 'Fail' Online Test" notes how famous literary pieces by the likes of Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway scored poorly when they were graded by computers. The article doesn't get into the complexities of analyzing the computer's grading system, but it does mention that the automatic grading system cannot pick up on human emotion and language subtleties.&#16

 Here's an interesting article in the New York Times about a situation being debated in the British Supreme Court right now. There are public religious schools in England that are allowed to admit students based on their religion but not on their race or ethnicity.

Here's another attempt at attempt at a MyLifeBits project. He only does it for a week, but he includes his daily conversations as well. He doesn't seem to offer many new insights into the issues surrounding capturing every possible ounce of digital data.

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

 According to this article, it looks like there is some movement on creating a semantic web search, though the article writer seems a bit skeptical of its ability to deliver. T2 (a new project by the makers of Twine), which may come out by the end of the year, is hoping to index the top few dozen sites in major categories. Interestingly, T2 will be adding the semantic tags, not the owners of the sites themselves.

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.

Wolfram Alpha is a new search engine that launched in May that is geared toward an educated audience looking just for data. Instead of providing a list of links like Google or another search engine, WA returns just the data and relevant graphs. The system's strengths are real-time calculations, powerful algorithms that search the web, and curated data sets.