i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Remember when the "chess-playing computer" beat a chess champion in 1997? Well, IBM is now ready to unveil a computer that can translate the nuanced vernacular of Jeopardy (the game). Check it out in this article.

http://youtu.be/F0QXB5pw2qE

Recently, Google released an interesting video that uses popular and fastest-rising search keywords in 2010. Using their collected data, they compile them into a video describing the overview and story of 2010.

This is interesting for all who fell in love with 202 topics: Google is searching for an intern who can do exactly what we have been learning and practicing for the last 4 months...

http://www.google.com/jobs/students/us/internships/eng/librarian-internship-cambridge/index.html

Here’s a great example of a multimedia Personal Information Management system. Gregg Gillis, the artist behind the musical mash-up sensation Girl Talk, discusses on NPR how he organizes the music he samples in his work. Here is the most interesting quote about his system:

Three years ago, scientists published that Pluto would no longer belong to the solar system planets category. In their words, "all small and nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune, which is now the most distant planet from the sun, will fall under the new tag." 

As we have seen in class, the frequency of a term is not enough to infer the quality of the document that contains it. Recently, we have had the case of a  Brooklyn eyewear merchant who goaded customers into posting scathing online reviews, with a better position on Google searches. For that reason, Google has modified the search for that query to 'punish' that particular result. Is this good or bad?

This hilarious 2 minute video entitled "How to Report the News" is a satirical piece looking at the structure of news on TV. The video is in the format of a 2 minute news story but rather than present an actual piece of news each element of the news spot is replaced with its abstracted element.  The video is a metadata view at the predictable composition of the news.  The video's creator has done an excellent job of marking up typical news videos into an almost "microformat" of sorts.

 http://mapofmetal.com/

For the uninitiated, metal music seems to fall under these general descriptors: long hair, loud and aggressive vocals, fast guitar solos, and lyrics that are probably about killing people.

In prospect of our wine tasting next week:

I'd like you to point you to a very 202ish case of applications of facets: "The Wine Wheel" (www.tinyurl.com/wine202a)

Also, it is interesting to combine the classic categories of wines (red wines, white wines, and Merlot etc.) with the facet flavours. (www.tinyurl.com/wine202b)

Our class discussion about language translation last week reminded me of the book "English as She is Spoke."  It is a Portuguese-English phrasebook created by first going from Portuguese to French, and then from French to English, the latter step purportedly using dictionaries (literal translation).  The outcome was bad, and funny.