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February 2001
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Sunday, November 06, 2005 - Horse and Buggy Syntax
For class on Saturday we showed Bill Gate's talk at UW promoting higher education in Computer Science and Biology, talking about the future of technology in your every day life. In it, he talked about how Microsoft needed to increase the "one-click" response of search, i.e. getting the results you want on the first hit. He said the average rate of 1st hit success was about 10%, and that he wanted to drive that up to 90% in the next four to five years. But think about who his audience was... Is your search success rate really as low as 10%? And are your parents' really as high as 10%? What got me thinking about this was a lyric in Common Sense's song "6th Sense." [ Some days I take the L to gel with the real world | Got on the 87th, stopped by this little girl ] and I wanted to make sure that the 87th really was a stop (in retrospect, I got on it in August with Hark coming home from the south side ) because up until I heard this I didn't realize the Chicago connection. My search was "cta map red line", which was a success, partly because of Google, and partly becuase I know how to use google. To me, searching like that IS a natural language. It's hard to think of a clearer way to ask for a map than that string. But if my mom was to look for a CTA map she definitely wouldn't have started like that. For her, Natural Language Recognition would be really useful. I know for a fact (she's whined about it many times) that she's spent hours on google with similarily simple searches, with no results. This is one example of technology changing part of the natural langauge of my generation. We still speak, but we have found a different way of representing information. Something tells me it's not just computers. Did people pick up a different syntax when automobiles supplanted the horse and buggy? I'm no historian, but I think so. They definitely developed different mannerisms. Common Sense - The 6th Sense - [ Somedays I take the L to gel with the real world Got on at 87th, stopped by this little girl She recited raps, I forgot where they was from In 'em, she was saying how she made brothers cum I start thinking, how many souls hip-hop has affected How many dead folks this art resurrected How many nations this culture connected ]
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