i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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

Wednesday's lecture about mobile and multimedia IR got me thinking about the great This American Life episode about people who try to quantify the unquantifiable — and specifically about the two artists who tried to distill what elements would combine to make the songs that would be the most and least pleasing to the greatest number of people.

Just heard about this project, the total scope of which seems outside of 202 (but is still fascincating): the MediaBugs project (http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/11/how-do-we-categorize-all-journalistic...) hopes to be a fact- and system-checking process similar to bug tracking in software development.

The most 202-ish aspect of this is their call for help in categorization:

Tobacco companies are avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxes by altering categories. Please refer to following link for further information:

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/17/tobacco-companies-using-l_n_360...

Doesn't it look similar to "potato chips" case? (reading for L2)

- Dhawal

I was reading this article in The New Yorker about a book called "Eating animals" today and something came to my mind. Somehow categories define how we feel. I like eating "pork", but maybe I wouldn't like to eat "pig". We also do not want to have "cow sausages", let's better call them "beef sausages". Why don't we eat "dog" or "cat"? Well... because they are pets, aren't they?

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.

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.

Starting around minute 11 of Part A of the show Whad'ya Know (their site provides a link to --boo-- Real Player at http://www.notmuch.com/Show/Archive.pl?s_id=570, iTunes link at http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=2196956...), there's an interview with Steven Pinker. Pinker talks a lot about metaphor, is framed as Lakoff's "foil" in linguistics, though Pinker doesn't go that far. And I didn't digest our dense Lakoff reading well enough to be able to tell if what Pinker was talking about really goes against it.

In the NY Times this morning, there's an article about the importance of comparing new technology to existing and familiar technology, so that people can understand what the new stuff is and how it should be used.

The article states "Humans instinctively sort and classify things. It’s how we make sense of a complex world."

Another quote that I like, this time about the Segway: "...Professor Markman said. “Nobody was quite sure what it was,” he said. “There was no clear analogy, so people had no idea how to use it.”

In reference to a pre-class discussion George, Jess, and I had: there was an annoucement by a bicycle headset manufacturer that they're going to create an online headset fit database to help people who were in George's position. The "step-by-step" process doesn't look like it will need to be very deep, but could be faceted... we'll see.