Attended a lecture by John Giannandrea, CTO of Metaweb Technologies on "Freebase: An Open Database of the World's Information" at PARC which happens to be just across the street from VMware office.
ABSTRACT
Freebase -- an open database of the world's information -- is built by a global community and is free for anyone to query, contribute to, and build applications on. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, Freebase is curated by a passionate global community of users and contains structured information on millions of topics such as music, food ingredients, rocket engines, stock indices, historical events, and more.
This was arranged as a part of 'Going Beyond Web 2.0' lecture series.Online archive of previous lectures can be found here.
Notes to self
Revisit - DB normalization, Transaction processing.
I vaguely remembered reading about Once, an Academy/Grammy award winning Irish musical, so thought of giving it a try. We*’re not especially fans of musicals and when we read the movie description on Netflix DVD cover we were really disappointed. Being a strong believer in Collection Fusion (yet another Info retrieval buzzword), I usually dissect the movie before watching it by reading IMDB reviews…as there is nothing more painful in life than watching a crappy movie on a lovely weekend! Also we are past the stage where we would like to watch the first day first show of any movie so it’s better to play it safe by knowing in advance whether it is worth the time. Though usually I am very meticulous I somehow forgot to do this ritual for Once and it turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. It made our weekend musical and magical! I can still hear those words lingering in my head…Falling slowly, Say it to me now, When your mind is made up …Superb music, awesome lyrics…I cannot (and don’t want to either) get those beautiful songs out of my head. More about the movie here.
Go grab a DVD now! Believe me you’ll love it!
*Usage "we" is a side effect of marriage and refers to me and my better half Minu:)
Membership in UPE, like many other honor societies, is lifetime; however student members inducted get a free year of ACM membership as well. Additionally, UPE gives out a number of scholarships for its members and ACM members.” – Wikipedia.
Apart from the lifetime membership I will receive a recognition pin, certificate and honor cord to wear at my graduation in May.
R. Jacob Vogelstein, One of the professors @ Hopkins, has started a new website called “Encyclopaydia” to keep a database of salary information of Hopkins alumni. This is a great tool as it gives a good idea about what to expect in terms of salary when you graduate and provides a basis to negotiate the salary with a potential employer.
There might be better websites of this kind out there but this is the first one that I came across. Do have a look!
