i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

In the following blog, I would like to talk about examples of cultural categorization, in the form of abstraction and imagery representations found in languages.  In specific, I would like to draw several examples from the Russian language.

I came across an article about the BIObus, which is currently travelling across North America collecting insects and other invertebrates. The BIObus supports the Barcode of Life Project, which is a collaborative effort among researchers to create a digital identification system for life on Earth. Scientists take tissue samples from each specimen, extract DNA and then register the sample into a global database.

Here's the current intro to chapter 9, all about the Mütter Museum and its very strange collections. If you're ever in Philly and have the chance to go, totally do it, it's amazing.

http://oberlin.edu/news-info/05sep/art.html

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Memorial_Art_Museum#Art_Rental

In case there's other ideas for the i202 midterm....

Google Doc - Template
1. (For i202 Class Sections 10/18) Google Doc <<--- Use this document as a TEMPLATE / COPY/PASTE and do your own. (we can aggregate later and do "crowdsourcing" to collect our wisdom about the book and course..)

While it is highly unlikely that there will ever be a need to classify cow sculptures as animals instead of artwork, there are some current real world classification dilemmas occurring. 

I think that San Francisco's current system of regulating street food vendors is an example of a classification problem. Personally, I think that street food should be classified under activity that the health deparment regulates because I think food service is related to public health. But that's not how it is in San Francisco.

First and foremost, watch the video before reading my blog. It's only three minutes long, and I think it's really lovely. Also, the way you watch it changes if you're not watching it naively. 

If you have the time, the entire hour-long "Words" episode, is really interesting and relevant to some things we've been talking about in class.

Published Monday, the NYT wrote about the Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL). This article touches upon many topics from recent lectures!