i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Last month, news (http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/19/pif.flu/) broke that pigs in Minnesota had tested positive for H1N1 (aka "Swine Flu").  The story mentions what has been reported numerous times before: H1N1 is not foodborne.  Two days later, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) turned to Congress for financial support.  The NPPC (http://www.nppc.org) reports that the U.S.

I was reading this article in The New Yorker about a book called "Eating animals" today and something came to my mind. Somehow categories define how we feel. I like eating "pork", but maybe I wouldn't like to eat "pig". We also do not want to have "cow sausages", let's better call them "beef sausages". Why don't we eat "dog" or "cat"? Well... because they are pets, aren't they?

On Tuesday, San Francisco voters approved Proposition C, which repeals 2004's Proposition H, a measure that banned the city from selling the naming rights to Candlestick Park. Prop H made it so that Candlestick would stay Candlestick—no 3Com, Monster, etc. But Prop C undoes that. It's interesting that the city's attitude changed so drastically in 5 years. Why are San Franciscans willing to give up a name now that they fought for five years ago? The recession?

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, just decided to allow top-level domains to be written in Unicode rather than ASCII, which will for the first time enable a full URL to be constructed out of non-Latin characters, which should improve accessibility for users in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.  It will also open up a new trove of domains to register; some Icann officials claim there are so many .com Web addresses that it has become next to impossible to find an English word or an intelligible combination of two English words not already in use.

202 in the Whitehouse:  a selection from Obama's recent email communications from guardian.co.uk on 10/26:

Quoted Text --------------------------------------------

To: VPOTUS <joe.biden@whitehouse.gov>

Re: Fwd: "Jonas Bros music never been used in torture, except maybe here in the White House" Hilarious stuff!!!

Yeah, I've read it Joe. I'm the one who sent it to you. You see the thing at the top where it says "Fr: POTUS"? That means me. Barack

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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?

The U.S. government agreed to create a new international panel made up of other goverments and businesses that will review decisions made by ICANN, the organization that controls the itnernational domain name structure.

This has a number of implications for info organization and retrieval.