i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

With a 'radical overhaul' of its website, Twitter has to decide how to describe itself. 'Media company' or 'Content Aggregator' or both?

Patrick McKenzie has identified 40 incorrect assumptions that programmers (and non-programmers) tend to make about names (of people, that is). Some of the assumptions are common "obvious" facepalms like #21:  "People’s names are globally unique" (how many Michael Davises or Ali Mohammeds are out there, do you suppose?) or #7: "People’s names do not change" (oh hi, newlyweds!).

In an attempt to reduce spam, scams, and the spread of pornography via cell phone, the Chinese government is requiring citizens and visitors to provide identification when purchasing a SIM card. Working with government-control telecom companies, convenience store owners and street vendors, China hopes to organize a system in which all cell phone numbers and SIM cards can be linked to an individual.

Haven’t you run across images online where you’ve wondered what a particular item in the image was? And then read the image caption to discover that it told you nothing about what you were wondering about. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could describe parts of an image that may or may not contribute to the overall message in the name of the file or the image caption? Well, now you can.