i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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?

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.  As bandwidth and

Most of us have heard of service dogs — but what about service horses, chimpanzees, or parrots? Should they be treated the same way under the Americans with Disabilities Act that more "typical" or "expected" service animals are? Or should there be different categories within the designation of "service animal" to determine which companions are allowed in which public places? That's the subject of this December 31, 2008 New York Times Magazine story.

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that.

Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2009

"In Tax Case, 4 Days Save Robertson $27 Million"

This article might not be available to you if you aren't a subscriber (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125729222815826639.html#mod=todays_us_mo...) so I'll summarize it.

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. However, a group of researchers found that while 9 out of 10 people have said that it has influenced them to make healthier choices about what they purchase, they "found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

This Economist article describes the use of bar codes in conjunction with mobile phone cameras to provide users with real-time, context-sensitive information. An example of this is the traveller photographing a barcode at a railway station with his mobile phone to obtain train timetables. Despite of varying bar code standards, the author suggests their free, open standard nature will encourage wider adoption. However, for this technology to become pervasive, collaboration between barcode software developer

Earlier this year, Craigslist, facing bad publicity and legal pressure, changed its "erotic services" category to "adult services". The site now charges $10 for each ad, and manually reviews each ad to ensure guideline compliance. When I originally read this article - and never having used that part of Craigslist (I tend to stick to the PG part) - I wondered if a name change would change anything at all?