"Wolfram says that trillions of pieces of data were selected and managed by a team of experts at Wolfram Research, and that these experts also tweak the information to ensure that it can be read and displayed by the system. He says the system has become proficient at eliminating "linguistic fluff," or words that are unnecessary for the location and computation of relevant data. This statement disappointed Boris Katz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is head of the Start natural language processing project. "I believe [Wolfram] is misguided in treating language as a nuisance instead of trying to understand the way it organizes concepts into structures that require understanding and harnessing," Katz says."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8026331.stm Imagine that... trillions! Katz, by the way, is the creator of start.csail.mit.edu that I linked to earlier. In other news, ZDNet reported that Strunk and White released a beta version of their highly popular guide to arguably better writing and Eric Raymond was seen sellling t-shirts hawking his "how to ask smart questions that answer themselves," both, no doubt, fueled by the rush of all these new Google-killers! Of course, my mom, who has still never used a computer in her life, is happy she doesn’t have to deal with nuggets like GDP of France and demography of Lexington. -- Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org/ Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org/ Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org/ Science Commons Fellow, Geospatial Data http://sciencecommons.org Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- collaborate, communicate, compete ======================================================================= _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
