i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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?

"The odds an adult believes there is a chance that Elvis Presley is still alive are 1 in 12.5". Answer to, is Elvis Presley alive? Website called "book of odds" is answering questions like these using semantic search. Its about applying semantic technology to simpler much simpler problem. Read further details in follwing article:

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/10/12/daily23.html

Book of Odds: http://www.bookofodds.com/

This 4 minute video, created by Dr. Michael Wesch for a class on digital ethnography, became really popular on youtube a couple of years back. It talks about - (really effectively!) - why and what is XML, XML vs HTML, social tagging, and several other pertinant 202 topics in the context of web 2.0.

If you have any doubts about XML vs HTML, do watch this!

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

-------------------------------------------- End Quoted Text

A number of the slides have been posted as non-searchable PDFs. Since I find it useful to be able to search/highlight/annotate PDFs, I've been running them through an OCR tool for my own use. With Bob's permission, I've uploaded the OCR'd versions, in case this would be useful for others:

http://drop.io/202slides
password='meaningisuse'

A thread on a discussion forum today was about tin foil. Tons of people say tin foil, yet it hasn't been made of tin since the middle of the 20th Century. But for some reason that made me think of "Saran Wrap" and how that's a more common term than "plastic wrap" even though it is a name brand.

 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

Via language log, this metadata mix-up in Google Scholar is kind of entertaining: 

During my search, I encountered the following citation (direct from Google Scholar to you):

Embuggerance, E., and H. Feisty. 2008. The linguistics of laughter. English Today 1, no. 04: 47-47.

After I stopped laughing, I set to figuring out what was going on.

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?

(No, there's no need to verify Bob's ID at the next class.)

Having received a misaddressed email from a classmate recently, I was delighted to see this new Gmail feature from Google Labs.  It might be just the ticket for solving what they refer to as the "Got The Wrong Bob" problem: even a unique identifier like an email address doesn't help when misapplied.

It looks like structured product labeling hasn't been enough to make the prescription labeling process a smooth system.