i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Maybe this is the same company Bob mentioned in lecture today. Either way, is this applicable to the context in which it was mentioned?

http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/10/30/04

Once again, public radio to the rescue.

Have been running into this link repeatedly these days - a flowchart rendition of the song Hey Jude.

A lot of people I know and don't know seem to love this flow chart. I wonder why?

Is it just an interesting and novel way to look at a song lyric, do we (as humans) like things better when simplified for us - broken down into steps, do we really like our things, even pieces of art, organised?

 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...

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.&#16

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.

In Morten Hansen's Managing in Information-Intensive Companies class (Info 290 - highly recommended) today, we studied the failures that led to the Columbia disaster.  One key failure in particular stemmed from the lack of semantic unifomity in a set of terms used to describe distinct grades of system damage and the safety risks those damages represented.  Problems they described as in-family were known (recurring) problems, but the implied meaning of this category was that there was no safety risk.  (The term itself was informal and borderline collo

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Lake v. City of Phoenix that as law dictates for public records disclosure (as it does in Phoenix), when public records are requested, even if they are in an electronic format, they must be provided and must include the metadata. From the decision:

“Unique ID will enable more effective public delivery”

Who knew that package size was a distinguishing property of cigars? From the WSJ, working around a recent ban on clove cigarettes, a company has rebranded their product as cigars.

In Lecture today, Bob made a point about the gap between humans & computers ability to sense and describe an object... and that a 3-year old is able to perform better (in terms of recognizing objects) than any computer.  But what about Facial Recognition software?

Facial Recognition software has been heavily invested in for a long time... perhaps we will move beyond recognizing faces to recognizing objects?