i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

This hilarious 2 minute video entitled "How to Report the News" is a satirical piece looking at the structure of news on TV. The video is in the format of a 2 minute news story but rather than present an actual piece of news each element of the news spot is replaced with its abstracted element.  The video is a metadata view at the predictable composition of the news.  The video's creator has done an excellent job of marking up typical news videos into an almost "microformat" of sorts.

The Michelin guide is the most haughty-tauty of all the restaurant ranking systems.  It is headquartered in Paris, France and has been the platinum standard of fine dining since the very early 1900s. 

Our very own local Berkeley establishment, Chez Panisse, lost its single star this year.

Anyone ever had experience organizing information into the synthesized format of a wikipedia article?

 you can get a lot of people to agree on a few things, and a few people to agree on a lot of things.  but you can't get a lot of people to agree on a lot of things.    

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.

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.

GMO salmon is under review for FDA approval.  This news has given rise to the classic debates over food labeling and the system for governing it.