During a visit to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem to check out the exhibition on volcanoes that opened yesterday, we ran into two kinds of animals; look at this page for images.

Listening to ''King Edwards Heart Dub'', by King Tubby (Play Count: 4)

Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages are a rich source of semi-structured information that seems ideally suited both for focused retrieval experiments and for pushing the boundaries of today's question answering (QA) research: while today's QA research is strongly focused on factoids, question/answer pairs in FAQs cover far richer questions (plus answers). Even for factoids (e.g., "Who wrote Post Office?") it is not always obvious what the appropriate answer format is— for questions beyond factoids, it is often far from obvious what a correct answer should like. This is one thing that FAQs "solve". Besides this, there are many other aspects that make retrieval against FAQs an appealing task. We should soon have a demo up and running where we implement QA as retrieval against an FAQ collection mined from the web.

Listening to ''Gendhing Lung Gadung'', by Kraton Yogyakarta (Play Count: 5)

Starting its publishing program in 2006, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval will publish high-quality survey and tutorial monographs of the field using modern techniques to enable both instant linking to the primary research in its electronic form and affordable paper copies, finally delivering on the promise to authors of multiple channel publishing from a single source. Download the flyer here.

iTunes is not playing.

Still getting up at weird hours after a recent trip to WWW 2005 in Japan, I watched Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa again this morning. Kanji Watanabe (played by Takashi Shimura) is a civil servant in a bureaucratic organisation. He learns that he's got cancer with only a few months to live. Watanabe then leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the time he has left to live. After finding short refuge in all of the things he was deprived of during his routine life he is inspired to do something meaningful — to leave a legacy, however small, that makes the world a better place. This must be one of the most moving films ever; most notable are the scene with Watanabe feeling spiritually "empty" after having drank and danced all night, and the scene after his funeral — which we see in flashback — with his friends recalling Watanabe's last moments.

Listening to ''Bossa Per Due'', by Nicola Conte (Play Count: 6)

Don't put your iPod through the washing machine. And if for some reason you do, don't try to fix it with a screwdriver. Find out more at this location.

Listening to ''Bick Neck Police'', by Lee Scratch Perry (Play Count: 90)