L8

Calling All Categorizers

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:

Taxing Tobacco

Tobacco companies are avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxes by altering categories. Please refer to following link for further information:

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/17/tobacco-companies-using-l_n_360...

 

Doesn't it look similar to "potato chips" case? (reading for L2)

 

- Dhawal

Classification Systems are Biased, Absolute Classification Systems (i.e. the Census) are Biased Absolutely

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.

Searching Congress

Can't believe I didn't know about this site before: http://metavid.org/wiki/

It allows you to search video of members' speeches before Congress with some interesting features. In addition to searching by keyword (I think through transcripts, which are provided by Congress), date, speaker, category (setting off 202 alarms), bill name/number, there are also some featured semantic queries.

Recommind CORE Offers Semantic Doc Storage

 I was looking up Reommind, one of the companies at the career fair from yesterday, and low and behold they have a software platform offering automatic categorization of enterprise documents based on context as their stored.  hmmm this sounds an awful lot like semantic classification to me. 

 

Check it out: http://www.recommind.com/technology/core

Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning

Wish I'd known about this taxonomy when I was teaching critical thinking. It really would have provided a good guide for structuring lessons.

Think I'm flopping towards the "Application" level with mixed success right now, with occassional backsliding. How about all of you? And do you think conceptualizing the learning process this way is useful for you as students? As teachers?

(The longer linked piece is even more acerbic, but worth a look if you have the time.)

The Uses of Metaphor

Starting around minute 11 of Part A of the show Whad'ya Know (their site provides a link to --boo-- Real Player at http://www.notmuch.com/Show/Archive.pl?s_id=570, iTunes link at http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2196956...), there's an interview with Steven Pinker. Pinker talks a lot about metaphor, is framed as Lakoff's "foil" in linguistics, though Pinker doesn't go that far. And I didn't digest our dense Lakoff reading well enough to be able to tell if what Pinker was talking about really goes against it.

How Would a Fool Sort Things?

Feeling like a fool after doing your faceted classification assignment? If so, you might get a kick out of a Malcolm Gladwell review of this book on intelligence, which addresses problems with modern IQ tests — particularly in the area of sorting. A few 202-ish excerpts:

It’s Brand New, but Make It Sound Familiar

In the NY Times this morning, there's an article about the importance of comparing new technology to existing and familiar technology, so that people can understand what the new stuff is and how it should be used.

The article states "Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world."

Another quote that I like, this time about the Segway: "...Professor Markman said. “Nobody was quite sure what it was,” he said. “There was no clear analogy, so people had no idea how to use it.”

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