Tender Loving Calls is an innovative, interactive and easy to use subscription telephone messaging service, designed to improve the quality of life for aging seniors and help families take better care of their aging loved ones from a distance.
    
    The associated web site TLC-Connect is to be for the family caregivers and is to be a dual-purpose social learning networking and marketing site. Recent research has shown that family caregivers are very active users of the internet, particularly social networks, both on and offline. They are keen to connect with others to discuss and learn from each others experiences. There are many web sites devoted to providing information on all aspects of aging and caregiving, however very few (if any) encourage communication and collaboration between their visitors. My aim is not just to provide information but to encourage users to share their experiences, using the blogging, forum systems and specialist groups within the TLC site, with the notion that ‘a problem shared is a problem solved’. 
    
    We have an interim web site at http://www.tenderlovingcalls.com and are currently building a full scale social learning network to take its place. We are looking for Interns who are interested in working to help develop an active and engaged community of users. In the process they will explore a different application of social networking that goes way beyond the world of Facebook and Twitter. Running a large scale focused social network is very much like being the producer of a live daily TV program. They will work directly with me to learn and master techniques which encourage active and sustained engagement within this community. They will have the opportunity to develop and explore their own ideas pertinent to  creating an engaging online environment designed to serve people (especially family caregivers) who are deeply concerned about providing care for our aging community.
    
    If you have any interest you can see some of my past projects at http://www.digitalslate.com.

IF INTERESTED, apply via UMBCworks or send your resume to Christine Routzahn at the Shriver Center (routzahn@umbc.edu)

Google has added an “entity disambiguation” feature along with auto-complete when you type in your search query. For example, when I search for George Bush, I get the following additional information in auto-complete.

As you can see, Google is able to identify that there are two George Bushes’ — the 41st and the 43rd President and accordingly makes a suggestion to the user to select the appropriate president. Similarly, if you search for Johns Hopkins, you get suggestions for John Hopkins – the University, the Entrepreneur and the Hospital.  In the case of the Hopkins query, its the same entity name but with different types and thus Google appends different entity types along with the entity name.

However, searching for Michael Jordan produces no entity disambiguation. If you are looking for Michael Jordan, the UC Berkeley professor, you will have to search for “Michael I Jordan“. Other examples that Google is not handling right now include queries such as apple — {fruit, company}, jaguar {animal, car}.  It seems to me that Google is only including disambiguation between popular entities in its auto-complete. While there are six different George Bushes’ and ten different Michael Jordans‘ on Wikipedia, Google includes only two and none respectively when it disambiguates George Bush and Michael Jordan.

Google talked about using its knowledge graph to produce this information.  One can envision the knowledge graph maintaining, a unique identity for each entity in its collection, which will allow it to disambiguate entities with similar names (in the Semantic Web world, we call it as assigning a unique uri to each unique thing or entity). With the Hopkins query, we can also see that the knowledge graph is maintaining entity type information along with each entity (e.g. Person, City, University, Sports Team etc).  While folks at Google have tried to steer clear of the Semantic Web, one can draw parallels between the underlying principles on the Semantic Web and the ones used in constructing the Google knowledge graph.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v52FLMOPSig

Walk and Talk the Vote – West Wing Reunion – Bridget Mary McCormack

The cast of the West Wing reunites to promote voting in non-partisan elections like. Who can say no to President Jed Bartlet?