i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Foolishness reigns in the Old World.

 Here's an interesting article in the New York Times about a situation being debated in the British Supreme Court right now. There are public religious schools in England that are allowed to admit students based on their religion but not on their race or ethnicity.

When it's a boneless wing — otherwise known as a little chunk of chicken breast pretending to be a wing. In a weird reversal of the typical chicken market, wholesale chicken wing prices are above breast prices these days, so some restaurants that don't want to scrap their wing dishes altogether are faking it with "boneless wings" . . . which aren't actually wings at all.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/21/israel.syria.facebook/index.html

Perfect example of the name matching problem discussed in Lecture 7. Strangely, I'm not even able to pull up Golan Heights (Israel or Syria) on the US Facebook site.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html

This essay from NYTimes.com poses an interesting question regarding how in the wake of Caster Semenya's gold medal victory at the world track and field chapionships, the International Assoc. of Athletics Federations is struggling to set clear rules for sex typing.

The team at Wordnik are trying hard not to let people think of them as a dictionary.

This Reuters article details the largest U.S. Internet service providers' efforts to have "broadband" defined conservatively, specifying speeds substantially below that of many other nations.

Needless to say, the ISPs pressing the FCC to apply the more conservative definition would benefit from not having to deliver greater bandwidth.  Some providers argued for a rate far below the U.S.'s already-low rate (ranked 19th worldwide).