i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Thanks to thatwhichmatter, I came across the term "hapax legomenon". (In a quick search, I found that this is also the name of a character in the MMORPG City of Heroes.)

“Unique ID will enable more effective public delivery”

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.

(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.

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 U.S. government agreed to create a new international panel made up of other goverments and businesses that will review decisions made by ICANN, the organization that controls the itnernational domain name structure.

This has a number of implications for info organization and retrieval.

While I was making my vocabulary the other night, I realized I'd totally forgotten to post about this controversy over the video game Scribblenauts. In the game, you draw "any word you can think of" to move your cute little hero character around — but what if the word you write is "sambo"?

I'll see Jess's game show and raise with my bid of The Starlost. Which I thought was pretty damn spiffy when I was a kid.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/21/israel.syria.facebook/index.html

Perfect example of the name matching problem discussed in Lecture 7. Strangely, I'm not even able to pull up Golan Heights (Israel or Syria) on the US Facebook site.

Heard an interesting program on NPR with one of the authors of the book "Consequential Strangers"; the book makes a new classification for those people who intersect our lives to some effect, but who aren't really friends. You can take a <a href="http://www.consequentialstrangers.com/?p=416" target="_blank">quiz online</a> to see who or what kind of people fall into this class.