Wartburg College is a fantastic college located in small town Iowa, but sometimes the need to protect the farmers of Iowa gets rather humorous … and this comes from a man whose family has proudly raised "Hoeg Hogs" for generations (except me … the web nerd). Upon inspecting the email (click to expand image), you will see the correspondence avoids any mention of the word "swine" or "flu" in the "all parents" email title. Quite frankly, with a title like N1H1 Information I surprised I even opened the darn thing!

Hey IBM Labs … many of the comments on your YouTube video about Watson playing on Jeopardy are not in the best of taste. I thought you (i.e. IBM) would appreciate a video response from the Northstar Nerd, particularly if my video was on target and in good taste. It's been 24 hours … post my video response! (Netizens … help me get my HAL 9000 video response posted!)

• IBM's Watson Computer Jeopardy Video

And my video response … submitted but not posted by IBM.

Isaac Asimov, where are you! IBM has just announced that its Watson computer will play a group of Jeopardy champions. Some of you may remember when IBM programmed Deep Blue and then had it play chess grand master Garry Kasparov. You can link to YouTube and watch a short video on this new effort. This will create buzz!  I will be watching Jeopardy that day (date not yet announced).

Mathematica was a huge step forward in computational software … will Stephan Wolfram finally demonstrate the next generation search engine? Attend the live webcast from Harvard and learn for yourself. Here is the seminar / demo announcement:

Google has released some new services, Google Profiles and Google Similar Image Search. Both services are easy to use, and are worth the effort to learn. Let's first review Google Similar Image Search. Quite often when you are looking for an image, you have an idea of the desired image … but Google can not read your mind! For instance, let's say you wanted an image that shows brain neurons and waves. Using the new search capability you could query for brain images … and then when you see something you like, click upon the similar images link. Let's try it … by running a query on brain, you will find the image shown below. Click upon the similar images link! Neat, but more importantly … useful!

Let's do the same thing with the query cat … this time we want orange tabbys … our similar images results.

And the other new Google service? Profiles. Have you ever Googled your own name? Most of us have looked up our web results. Wouldn't it be nice if Google had a profile that they called in search results? The answer is "yes", and now Google has profiles. To learn how to build your profile, link here. if you would like to see how results are presented, here is the Google query for Richard Hoeg (me). Profiles are listed at the bottom of your result pages. Look for my thumbnail photo.