i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

From an article in today's Oakland Tribune:

The computers of the U.S. Census Bureau collected data about same-sex couples in the last census and, in effect, responded: "does not compute."

Any woman who reported she lived with a wife in the 2000 census, or any man who said he lived with a husband, was considered a statistical glitch.

Comments in lecture today reminded me of this favorite sociological study. Note the "Repeat When Necessary" panel.

In the spirit of David Kirsch's take on trashing strategies: What's your most painful trashing experience? Put another way, what information did you knowingly toss, then realize much later that you really, really wanted it back? I'll get it started with a couple of slightly embarrassing stories ...

The subject of task-specific workspaces came up today in class - both OS X (since Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux have a relevant feature that allows you to have multiple desktops with different applications open (unlike in the reading, the icons on the desktop stay the same in OS X).

This blog post provides a quick overview of the concept of virtual desktops, their history, and a thoroguh look at how OS X handles the problem (OS X specific info is on page 3).

I dump every important electronic document I want to store into this open source app.  It indexes them and makes them available wherever I am.

Knowledgetree

This movie is about a man who is searching for his wife's killer -- only he can't remember what has just happened.

It takes on a different context given our discussion of PIM and MyLifeBits

Memento

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5il908VQYZ0AFvVbtTYna7...

In the spirit of today's lecture topic.

Last week, a T-mobile spokesperson said:

"personal information stored on your devices – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly been has lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger." Nonetheless, "our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information."

The  NY Times just ran an article about the federal initiative called Secure Flight - which requires the name on your ID needs to match your airplane ticket - and the problems that can arise when you use several versions of your own name.

I was aware of the initiave, but I didn't realize that you'll also have to provide your date of birth and your gender when you make a reservation! You think the security people are going to try and verify gender?

The course page for this class and ISSD incorporares a new feature since last week, which Bob announced through the class mailing list: A RatingSystem.

The rating system both makes sense for Bob to reinvent the class for next semester, and for us, if we don't have any time to focus on the most valuable readings. In order to set a good example, I started rating the readings I've done. And I suddenly found myself in a hard position to determine the way how I rate.

Here is an article I found about Obama's healthcare reform. It relates to lecture 16 because Obama is pushing for digital health records, personal information that can be accessed by the appropriate parties (i.e. doctors you are visiting) instantaneously. It is also pushing for better data interoperability between different hospitals and doctors. One positive aspect noted by the article is the possibility of reducing costs, by preventing repeat tests.

 NYC pioneered a project where fast food chains were required to post the calorie count of individual food items right next to their listing on the menu.

Was calling in a prescription refill this morning, got the doctor's answering service (not the office). I could hear typing while I left my info, and checked that they were in fact using a computer-based message-taking-and-delivering system -- though I'm sure there's an actual term for that sort of thing. They took my name, phone #, doctor's name, other info, but said they could not take the name of the Rx itself.

Alex bookmarked this link to the New York Times Magazine story about Pandora earlier today, and I hope I'm not stepping on any toes by reposting it here, because I think there are a bunch of pretty fascinating 202-ish issues contained within that I'd love to discuss. Specifically, Pandora stood out to me after our "wisdom of crowds" discussion as a service that basically rejects the crowd and goes with recommendations derived from the basic components of music as broken down by experts.

The Clay Shirky article referred to by Marlow et al in the Tagging Paper is makes for highly entertaining reading. Shirky writes about the differences between thinking about professionals doing categorisation to people doing tagging on the web and when it makes sense to do one or the other. He calls this difference 'browse versus search':

It's now official, though many in the SEO industry have known for years -- Google's search algorithms don't take into account the meta tag in its web rankings. Google says that the main reason is because people were abusing the tag.  Not a big surprise for people in the SEO industry, but Google says that they they of couse *may* use them in years to come for something--though probably not.