i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) is renovating its technology infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of digital storage. 

This morning I was doing research for a friend.  Found a useful piece of info embedded in the webpage.

I copied from the webpage and then pasted into the chat window in gmail.

What got pasted is shown below.  Notice the "Read more,"  somewhere along the chain the browser and gmail working in nice harmony decided I wanted to share data about my data.  Which frankly though I did not ask for explicitly with my keyboard commands, in the end I am glad they enhanced by data in such a way.

Did this only work because I was running gmail within chrome? 

any hackers want to write a program that takes the corpus of student notes and crafts narrative responses to the question prompts.  the program can be run on the day of the test locally without any need to access internet (per regulations) perhaps employing some of the data mining techniques in from "knowledge to babel" comments encouraged.

Those of you who're interested in dashboards and how visualize complex information, might want to check out a source called Perceptual Edge. One of the partners of the company, Stephen Few, has done a lot of work studying the best ways to communicate complex business information in limited space. He was a guest lecturer in the InfoViz class last semester and provided a lot of good examples of well-designed dashboards. I believe he is also a lecturer at Haas, so he cares both about the business value of those dashboards and about their usability.

I'd like to take natural languages as an example for an interesting question I'm thinking about and use this to analyze implications for Controlled Vocabularies.

This post partially refers to a previous blog post (courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i202/f10/blog/cultural-categorization) where the topic of cultural categorization using Russian imagery expressions as an example has been analyzed.

The metaphor of a women dominated text-processing department points out that there has been a centralized place several decades ago to process information that are meant for internal or external stakeholder - as described by Bob. This centralization - may it be intestinally or due to technological restrictions - enabled companies to enforce company-wide Corporate Communication policies and even Corporate Identities easier as nowadays.

Pursuant to this morning's discussion about knowledge and who owns it, I think you might find this case particularly interesting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_v._Papermaster. Yes, it's a Wikipedia link, but I wrote it as an assignment for Brian Carver's IP Law for the Info Industries class last year, so you can trust it. I wrote Papermaster's Wikipedia page too, which will give you a little more background.

We have been talking a lot about classification.  Turns out there is a classification system for classified information in the context of gov't data. 

Is this just cute wordplay or is this interesting?  I think the later.  The decision making process that goes into classifying such information definitely piques my interest.  Will research on my own.

Nick Bilton wrote an interesting post about a service called HasWifi that "helps travelers find internet-connected flights". Obviously, this is yet another instance of an organizing system. What is being organized is information regarding wireless internet access on planes during flights. The scope is limited to seven flight carriers and users can narrow it down by flight numbers as well.

 http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge