People who’s native language is Perl might find the Perl/Python phrasebook handy. When talking to the Python interpreter, some try hand gestures, typing slowly or using ALL CAPS, but these seldom work and can often annoy or even alarm the interpreter. This phrasebook covers the most common things you need to say to a simple Python system. For example, if you wanted to tell it to read your file as a list of lines, there’s a phrasebook entry that that shows just how to say it.

my $filename = “cooktest1.1-1″;
open my $f, $filename or die “can’t open $filename: $!\n”;
@lines = <$f>;

–

filename = “cooktest1.1-1″
f = open(filename) # Python has exceptions with somewhat-easy to
# understand error messages. If the file could
# not be opened, it would say “No such file or
# directory: %filename” which is as
# understandable as “can’t open $filename:”
lines = f.readlines()

Many of the entries also contain helpful facts and advice about the customs and social norms of native Python speakers. Not only can this keep you out of trouble, it will deepen your understanding of the colorful and sometimes quaint Python speakers. I hope that the pocket travel version of the phrasebook, suitable for downloading onto an ipod, will be out soon.

I thought the informal statistics from mentioned in this short USA Today story, Facebook friends share ’25 Things’ with the world, were interesting. (Emphasis added)

“If you are a member of the 150-million-strong Facebook nation, you have probably learned some fascinating — or, let’s face it, some not-so-fascinating — facts about your friends as part of the latest fad, the pass-it-forward viral game “25 Random Things About Me.”
…
The phenomenon continues to snowball. Facebook can’t quantify activity specific to 25 Things as it does applications such as Flixster. But spokeswoman Brandee Barker says that over the past week the number of daily “notes” has more than doubled and the number of daily tags of a Facebook member in a note has grown by five times. “I would say that anecdotally I’ve never seen a note spread as quickly as this has on Facebook,” Barker says. “What is really unique about this is it’s a really meaningful piece of content. Some of the these notes are touching and frankly very insightful.”

Yesterday’s NYT also had a story on the fad, Ah, Yes, More About Me? Here Are ‘25 Random Things’.

As internet fads go, it probably has not yet peaked. Possible evidence is that there isn’t a Wikipedia article on the phenomenon yet, or even a mention of it on the its List of Internet Phenomena. So there is still time to get in and be cool.

IDG news service has a story sketching how Google Researcher Targets Web’s Structured Data. This is not directed at data published in machine understandable form (e.g., in RDF), but on other kinds of structured data accessible on the web.

“Internet search engines have focused largely on crawling text on Web pages, but Google is knee-deep in research about how to analyze and organize structured data, a company scientist said Friday. “There’s a lot of structured data out on the Web and we’re not doing a good job of presenting it to our users,” said Alon Halevy during a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Halevy was referring in part to so-called “deep Web” sources, such as the databases that sit behind form-driven Web sites like Cars.com or Realtor.com. Google has been submitting queries to various forms for some time, retrieving the resulting Web pages and including them in its search index if the information looks useful.

But the company also wants to analyze the data found in structured tables on many Web sites, Halevy said, offering as an example a table on a Web page that lists the U.S. presidents. And there are reams of those tables — Google’s index turned up 14 billion of them, according to Halevy. He “realized very quickly that over 98 percent of these are not that interesting,” but even after significant filtering there remain about 154 million tables worth indexing, he said.

ReadWriteWeb also has a story (Google: “We’re Not Doing a Good Job with Structured Data”)on that Google is or isn’t doing with structured data, including an interesting admission by Google researcher Halevy.

“During a talk at the New England Database Day conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google’s Alon Halevy admitted that the search giant has “not been doing a good job” presenting the structured data found on the web to its users. By “structured data,” Halevy was referring to the databases of the “deep web” – those internet resources that sit behind forms and site-specific search boxes, unable to be indexed through passive means.”

For some technical details on the issues and current work, see the paper Google’s DeepWeb Crawl by researchers from Google (including Halevy), UCSD and Cornell published in the Proceedings of VLDB 2009.

Dow Jones is hosting a free one hour webinar about the Semantic Web, on Thursday 12 February 2009 at 10:00am and again at 2:00pm EST. The webinar, The Semantic Web: Discover, Determine and Deploy, is the first in a tree-part series on the Semantic Web. I’ll be interested to see how this is presented for what I assume is a very pragmatic, business-oriented audience.

“Dow Jones notes that “these days it’s critical for organizations to consume, digest, and share news and information. The Semantic Web is no longer ahead of its time and is rapidly changing how organizations keep up with information overload.” This webinar is Part I of a series and in it you will learn how Semantic Web Technologies enable you to re-use valuable information to save costs, facilitate easier collaboration and sharing of critical information across your business, and increase search relevancy and surface the most valuable information needed to remain competitive.”

The presenters are Christine Connors and Daniela Barbosa , both members of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. The webinar is free but requires registration.

Spotted on ReadWriteWeb.

No doubt about it, President Obama is a polymath.

Feather Tether is one of the games produced by participants at the UMBC Global Game Jam site.

“Two birds race to the moon and while a tether holds them together. These conflicting buddies must stay together and protect the tether by all means, yet compete to win. To achieve the ultimate goal both players should cooperate to survive their adventure to the moon.”

This was the top-ranked game that came out of the UMBC site based on the votes of the participants.

It’s a five minute flash game that you can download it and play on almost any platform. As an added bonus if you do download it, you’ll get the source! After playing the game, you can rate it on the Global Game Jam site.