i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s new messaging service, he claimed that it would catch spam and unwanted messages thanks to the ‘Social Inbox’ feature. Knowing who your friends are can help to block unwanted messages from people you don’t know. However automated spam detection might not be the biggest problem anymore in the fight against spammers. As The Economist reports in their November 18^th issue spammers have found new strategies to keep their ‘business’ alive and profitable¹.

Cono. Curse word or a friendly expression amongst friends? Well, according to this article it all depends on which Spanish-speaking country (if any) you are from as well as the context and tone of the speaker. However, here on the page, the word likely means nothing because there's no tilde over the "n."

 In the November 29, 2010 edition of "The New Yorker," George Packer writes a review of George W. Bush's memoirs ("Decision Points"). According to Packer, the book goes beyond making a "contribution to the study of American history." Bush Jr. also wanted to "join the section of advice tips from successful executives." How would you shelve this memoir?

While listening to NPR's This American Life this week, I learned all about Poo Prints, a service provided by a firm called BioPet Vet Lab. They started out selling DNA testing services to establish the genetic history of dogs and have expanded to now offer Poo Prints, which helps property managers/governments/etc figure out which dog owner is not cleaning up after their dog.

It is interesting how different cultures classify incomprehensible concepts. In almost every language there is an expression that is used when a concept is not well understood. For example, English speakers say: "This is Greek to me". While in Spanish, when something is not understood, they say "esto me suena a chino" (this sounds Chinese to me). Furthermore, Germans tend to say that it sounds Spanish to them; "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor".

Maps. Most people think of them as a means of a getting us from Point A to Point B, but this article discusses how they have become more than a tool that keeps us from getting lost. In the not so distant past, we relied on paper maps that, for the most part, provided the user with a consistent visual vocabulary to determine exactly how to get from Point A to Point B.

In Bob’s lecture last Wednesday he talked about the use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for essay grading. This got me thinking about the ways that we are increasingly using computers for content analysis, which in turn is shaping the content that we create, so that this content can to be more easily “understood” by computers. As Kimra notes in her blog post on LSA, human graders may emphasize structure over content while computers graders may emphasizes vocabulary over structure. As we move toward having LSA graded tests people’s writing will be changed by these considerations.

short description of installation

video of installation

description of interaction with installation

I get chills, and a renewed sense of purpose everytime I watch the video of this installation.  The artists / computer scientists, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, have demonstrated how imaginative one can be when choosing how to represent data.  Their aesthetic decisions were not only beautiful, but imbued with meaning. 

We were talking in class recently about Google's book scanning efforts in France.  Here is an article on the matter.