i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Just heard about this project, the total scope of which seems outside of 202 (but is still fascincating): the MediaBugs project (http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/11/how-do-we-categorize-all-journalistic...) hopes to be a fact- and system-checking process similar to bug tracking in software development.

The most 202-ish aspect of this is their call for help in categorization:

 This article is funny and sad at the same time. Someone working for PepsiCo misplaced some paperwork regarding a lawsuit against the company.. so Pepsi failed to send a representative to the trial, letting the plaintiffs win by default... to a sum of $1.26 billion dollars.

http://consumerist.com/5392454/misplaced-letter-costs-pepsico-126-billio...

 NYC pioneered a project where fast food chains were required to post the calorie count of individual food items right next to their listing on the menu.

Was calling in a prescription refill this morning, got the doctor's answering service (not the office). I could hear typing while I left my info, and checked that they were in fact using a computer-based message-taking-and-delivering system -- though I'm sure there's an actual term for that sort of thing. They took my name, phone #, doctor's name, other info, but said they could not take the name of the Rx itself.

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:

In reference to a pre-class discussion George, Jess, and I had: there was an annoucement by a bicycle headset manufacturer that they're going to create an online headset fit database to help people who were in George's position. The "step-by-step" process doesn't look like it will need to be very deep, but could be faceted... we'll see.

Heard an interesting program on NPR with one of the authors of the book "Consequential Strangers"; the book makes a new classification for those people who intersect our lives to some effect, but who aren't really friends. You can take a <a href="http://www.consequentialstrangers.com/?p=416" target="_blank">quiz online</a> to see who or what kind of people fall into this class.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/technology/companies/14craigslist.html

Earlier this year, Craigslist, facing bad publicity and legal pressure, changed its "erotic services" category to "adult services". The site now charges $10 for each ad, and manually reviews each ad to ensure guideline compliance. When I originally read this article - and never having used that part of Craigslist (I tend to stick to the PG part) - I wondered if a name change would change anything at all?

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

This article, published by the BBC is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8241029.stm.

The author talks about the need for the technology industry to make use of the huge amount of government data the Obama administration is making available to the public.

However, the problem faced, as noted by the article is that all that is being made available is raw data. Innovators need to take advantage of this opportunity to collect these data and combine them into useful information to make the public more knowledgable about the workings of their country.