i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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

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!