i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Here's another attempt at attempt at a MyLifeBits project. He only does it for a week, but he includes his daily conversations as well. He doesn't seem to offer many new insights into the issues surrounding capturing every possible ounce of digital data.

As if organising information wasn't enough, we will now need to organise all the applications that deal with information!?! hah!

The article talks about how "Apple is outpacing competitors in the mobile apps arms race: There are roughly 10,000 applications available for Android-powered smartphones and around 300 for the Palm Pre." And yeah, there are over 100,000 apps available at the App Store !

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?

I read about this in the "other" university's design journal, and thought it would make for an interesting contrast to what we have been doing (trying?) for the past few weeks.

Turns out there's an interesting little library tucked away somewhere in San Francisco. The books are organised to encourage "exploration" and "serendipity". You begin with books about California and nearby, move towards West US, natural history and so on. The granularity of content increases with every shelf on a row. 

Is it any good? I wanna find out myself!

Demand Among Poor Farmers Keeps an Industry Growing as Other Sectors of the Economy Are Jolted

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/sports/22runner.html

This essay from NYTimes.com poses an interesting question regarding how in the wake of Caster Semenya's gold medal victory at the world track and field chapionships, the International Assoc. of Athletics Federations is struggling to set clear rules for sex typing.

This article, published by the BBC is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8241029.stm.

The author talks about the need for the technology industry to make use of the huge amount of government data the Obama administration is making available to the public.

However, the problem faced, as noted by the article is that all that is being made available is raw data. Innovators need to take advantage of this opportunity to collect these data and combine them into useful information to make the public more knowledgable about the workings of their country.

The "echo chamber" effect has been a source of interest and frustration for media and poltical junkies such as myself. This is what happens when Citizen A ("I only listen to Rush") or Citizen B ("I only read Kos") start looking around at for more information, usually from souces linked to or mentioned by their primary news source. As Burkeman's column points out, this is a social science phenomenon known as homophily.

This article in Science is about how linguists uncovered dozens of languages in a particular region in China. The striking thing : People who spoke different languages, and could barely understand each other, were less than 5 miles away !!

Interesting article about the latest breakthrough in disappearing inks.  In this case, a couple scientists from Northwestern University used nanoparticles embedded on super thin film.  The article mentions some applications of the new technology -- you could imagine time-sensitive materials like event tickets as a commercial application, or subscription news services that have a certain shelf life, or for use as super secure physical documentation.  From an information retrieval or organization perspective, t