Four short links: 17 June 2010

What is IBM’s Watson? (NY Times) — IBM joining the big data machine learning race, and hatching a Blue Gene system that can answer Jeopardy questions. Does good, not great, and is getting better.
Google Lays Out its Mobile Strategy (InformationWeek) — notable to me for Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups: A. “Repetitive now” B. “Bored now” C. “Urgent now”, a useful way to look at it. (via Tim)
BP GIS and the Mysteriously Vanishing Letter — intrigue in the geodata world. This post makes it sound as though cleanup data is going into a box behind BP’s firewall, and the folks who said “um, the government should be the depot, because it needs to know it has a guaranteed-untampered and guaranteed-able-to-access copy of this data” were fired. For more info, including on the data that is available, see the geowanking thread.
Streamhacker — a blog talking about text mining and other good things, with nltk code you can run. (via heraldxchaos on Delicious)

Statistical Jeopardy Wins, Mobile Taxonomy, Geodata Mystery, and Machine Learning Blog