i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I know we’ll spend a lot of time talking about privacy next spring in INFO 205, but over the course of this semester I’ve been reminded several times of this piece from NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/12/18/06. Aired about a year ago, it does a nice job of addressing the personal implications of a world where the line between information organization and retrieval is continually blurring.

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

I came across the following video: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/64111786/

This is 40-minute video exploring the history of Google and the company's current endeavors.  The video follows the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, from their first meeting at Stanford to the new media-company that collides with old media businesses of newspaper, books, movies and television.

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.

"Finally, Professional Dictation Software for the Mac"

According to the article, Andrew Taylor worked on creating speech recognition software for the Mac for 10 years while his competitor, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, made their own version.  In February of 2010 Dragon, now Nuance, bought Andrew's company and gave his team access to all of the company's dictation-software expertise, marketing power and other resources.

 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas

This article, published in the New Yorker, paints a humble portrait of the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.  In the article, Zuckerberg discusses his desire to create a more open, honest, and transparent world through Facebook.  

Books are important for I-Schoolers. Not just because the School of Information resides on the ground where the Library School once stood but also because libraries were the first to propose and partially solve the organization of information. Libraries are where it all started. The first information organization, the first information retrieval systems and the first document management systems. We discussed some of it in our classes, got our mind imploded with the "Library of Babel". We saw with amazement the old book catalog card Bob showed us in class.

Several weeks ago, the Oxford University Press conceded that because of the internet, there probably won't be a physical print version of the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7970391/Oxford-English-Dictionary-will-not-be-printed-again.html

I came across the following article: "Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload" 

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/02/ev-williams-twitter-will-actually-help-information-overload/

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.