August 12, 2005

Bored on the phone? Beware Jerk-O-Meter BusinessWeek- Ever wonder if that spouse, friend or co-worker on the other end of the phone is really paying attention? The "Jerk-O-Meter" may hold the answer. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing software for cell phones that would analyze speech patterns and voice tones to rate people -- on a scale of 0 to 100 percent -- on how engaged they are in a conversation. Anmol Madan, who led the project while he pursued a master's degree at MIT, sees the Jerk-O-Meter as a tool for improving relationships, not ending them. Or it might assist telephone sales and marketing efforts. 6:34:49 AM

Yahoo: We Don't Usually Talk Size, But Ours is Biggest Search Engine Lowdown -   Just in time for SES and the coverage of big announcements it inspires, Tim Mayer announced on the Yahoo blog an impressive 20 billion item index. That's "just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files." ... The last time Yahoo surpassed Google in index size it was only a matter of days (or was it hours?) before Google came back with their current claim of 8 billion. 6:32:47 AM

From time to time the Google guys come up with something new and cool.  For a long time the asterisk has been used for a wildcard.  So when you were searching for a file, and you didn’t know part of the name you could use an asterick to replace what you didn’t know and the computer would try and fill in the “blank”. Wouldn’t it be nice if search engines did the same thing?  Well Google is trying this.  Go to Google, and type in winnipeg is the * capital of canada  You will find out that we are not only the Slurpee capital, but the Christmas capital as well.. (you also discover that some people think we are the murder capital of Canada.)   Try estavan is the * capital of Canada and you discover that it is the Sunshine capital. 6:30:52 AM