i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I don't know much about Kwaga (http://kwaga.com/) except that it's a tool that performs semantic analysis on your Gmail in order to fill your calendar with dates, remind you to follow up when someone hasn't replied quickly enough, and warn you if there are passwords or other sensitive strings in a message.  None of this should disturb me--after all, mail is inherently insecure--and yet there is something unsettling to me here.  It runs your Inbox through its servers to do the semantic analysis, although it assures you that it would never share any of your email statistics.  T

Not to beat a dead horse, but this article in the New Yorker about the South African running champion Caster Semenya makes some very interesting connections between the androgynous runner's sexual identity and the historical politics of racial classification in her homeland.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/11/30/091130fa_fact_levy

Interesting post about how India’s days of vertical growth in outsourcing are coming to an end.  Why?  As Andrew McAfee noted in his talk “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” yesterday, IT systems are getting smarter and more powerful, allowing customers to interact directly with systems, and increasingly, systems interacting directly with other systems.

Every bleeping bean, indeed.

Until 2008, the Library of Congress offered a "digital interlibrary loan" service, where materials too fragile to circulate were scanned and delivered via the Web.  It looks as though the program's funding was cut, so you can't browse a full title list, but they still provide a selection of fragile items which are in the public domain, including one of the oldest examples of bike porn.

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

(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.

This Reuters article details the largest U.S. Internet service providers' efforts to have "broadband" defined conservatively, specifying speeds substantially below that of many other nations.

Needless to say, the ISPs pressing the FCC to apply the more conservative definition would benefit from not having to deliver greater bandwidth.  Some providers argued for a rate far below the U.S.'s already-low rate (ranked 19th worldwide).