i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Considering the important role of IO and IR in any markets and consequently in the green and sustainability market, one might ask: How effective is searching for green products, services, professionals, or businesses?

 The sudden increase in Image proliferation while exciting comes with a lot of obvious problems. As mentioned in the previous blog and comments, New Mobile Photo Sharing Applications Flood the Market, how will we efficiently search for specific parts of an image, different versions of the same image and digitally altered images when there are just so many available everywhere.

According to the New York Times, Silicon Valley is seeing a surge in new companies that focus on mobile photo sharing applications. Unlike many established competitors in the field, the new companies are developing mobile apps as a first priority and focusing less on the traditional web incarnation of their products. The photo apps vary in the features they offer, but often mimic the structure of existing social media applications.

Apparently, this is an individual classification system in a fun way. (Taken from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mootaz/ftp/html/research.html.)

This is a view of computer science research. Sarcasm abounds. This is supposed to be funny, but it can offend people. Don't read if you are easily offended, and don't get angry if your most favorite research topic is not presented appropriately. If your most favorite pet is not here, please let me know.

A nice list of the longest German words. However, it is important to note that German is not as awkward as it seems to be. This is clearly an artifact of German bureaucracy.

http://german.about.com/library/blwort_long.htm

Btw: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz means "beef labeling regulation & delegation of supervision law"

Is Qwiki the multimedia search engine of the future?

For those of you in Section C, you may recall when Rami mentioned that a startup named Qwiki, working on a multimedia information retrieval service, had won the grand prize of the venture competition at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference.

They have now moved into alpha, allowing testers to use their system and provide feedback. You can request an invite at http://www.qwiki.com or email me for one.

What is Qwiki?

When you type in phrases that are more natural to you but usually less processable by computers, search engines most of the times provide bad results. Google for instance gives you as the first result a website with the title "How to Figure Out What Size Turkey to Buy". To be fair, Google started to provide information such as population at the top of the search results when typing in more feasible questions. However, there is another search engine which specialized on quanitative data which is provided when querying actual questions. E.g.

 What gives a national park unit it's parkiness? Each park should satisfy these requirements: 

We've talked a lot about Moby Dick as an example of a narrative document, but Chapter 32 of Moby Dick deserves a place slightly farther to the right in the document type spectrum. Chapter 32 is all about cetology, the study of whales and dolphins.

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

Recently launched, Blekko, a new search engine, is attempting to provide users with better search results. Currently, when individuals search the web, they have to sort through various sites in order to find 'trustworthy' information. According to Rick Skrenta, CEO and co-founder of Blekko,'the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.'

There are still tasks out there which you can't easily do with a computer. They might be complex, ambiguous and/or adhoc. Why don't you get a online virtual assistant for that? S/he helps you with data analysis, research, outbound calling, blog management etc.

Check it out: www.asksunday.com/

 http://berkeley.worldcat.org/title/semantic-senselab-implementing-the-vision-of-the-semantic-web-in-neuroscience/oclc/506082546&referer=brief_results

What is being organized – things, information about things, information?

Neuroscience research data

Ontology design

What is the scope and scale of the domain?

DH's blog post made me think of a very weird sports franchise snafu that occurred fifteen years ago.