i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

You'd think, after finishing the final and the course, adding to the 202 blog would be the last thing on anyone's mind. But I saw this article and reflexively fired up the "Create Content" form, because this is essential 202, in my mind. It helped me realize why I've never been comfortable with music subscription services (I have a curated library that I don't want to get stuck behind a pay wall) and how musicians and industry would be better off if they could all agree to agree, for once.

Spock is a people search engine that uses a "man + machine" approach that includes text extraction and tagging to build pages about people. Spock crawls and indexes "people-related" web sites and augments this with editorial and social oversight.

http://searchengineland.com/spock-people-search-with-a-man-machine-appro...

Today's lecture on machine translation and language bias reminded me of this chestnut:

What do you call someone who speaks multiple languages?

Multilingual

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks one language?

American

Are people who live in a country without permission actually people? This question, and a host of other headscratchers, are being raised by a house bill sponsored by David Vitter, R-La., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah that proposes amending 2010 census to include immigration status. This can have a big impact on population-dependent congressional apportionment, especially in immigrant-heavy states like California and Flordia.

Inventor Wayne L. Wanous might be surprised that his invention, the APPARATUS FOR SORTING AND RETRIEVING CARDS, was mentioned in Bob's class today.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3688900.pdf

As context, there was a question in class regarding whether IR systems existed before the computer. Evidently, old-timey librarians had been at it for quite some time.

A recent study in Germany suggests that non-traditional first names are correlated with poor academic performances and bad behavior.

Surprisingly, at least for Americans, is the particularly poor performance associated with the name "Kevin". I've known some bad Jeffs, and even a few sketchy Erics, but Kevin? This guy?

Coding Horror, one of my favorite blogs, has an article on Xanadu, a vaporware software project envisoned by Ted Nelson in 1963 and still not quite in beta.

Today, October 7, could be re-christened "202 day" - it's hard to find someone or something that was born this day that doesn't merit a mention on this blog.

Let's take a look:

http://www.ajc.com/health/content/shared-auto/healthnews/cdc-/630785.html