i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

NPR recently featured a story on religiously-specific search engines. These search engines filter all results based on specific religious beliefs. There are currently separate search engines for Muslims, Christians and Jews. Besides the controversy over it being considered censorship, these search engines raise questions on how the returned results are being selected; particularly who is doing the filtering and what criteria is being used.

“When a tiger dies, it leaves its skin behind. When a person dies, he leaves his name behind.” Chinese proverb

As you know, we die someday. We will leave what we had, made and used. Nowadays, we are living on the web as well as physical world. On the web, we not only meet friends and family, also make a new friends. More works are done by and seen on the web. What is not on the web is sometimes regarded as even not existing. Then, what will happen to “my existence on the web” after I died?

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

A service that extracts associations and their relationships to entires in Wikipedia, i.e. crawling a wikipedia side an generating tags based on the content. The Platfrom works like a search engine wher users type in a word and an ontology that distinguishes between people, places, labels etc. is displayed.

dev.sigwp.org/WikipediaThesaurusV3/

Photo from doodlepuppy.com.

To illustrate the point that Bob made in class about tagging and controlled vocabularies, you may want to take a look at SociallyDelicious. Prateek, Yo-Shang and I created this tool last year in IOLab. The main idea is to see show people tag bookmarks in del.icio.us and whether their tagging behavior is influences by their level of expertise.

This week's New Yorker recently featured an interesting article about phone books. Once a source for information retrieval, "its legitimacy as a reference tool was undermined long ago-- first by 411, then by the Internet and smartphones."

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.

This essay from NYTimes.com poses an interesting question regarding how in the wake of Caster Semenya's gold medal victory at the world track and field chapionships, the International Assoc. of Athletics Federations is struggling to set clear rules for sex typing.

I was reading this article in The New Yorker about a book called "Eating animals" today and something came to my mind. Somehow categories define how we feel. I like eating "pork", but maybe I wouldn't like to eat "pig". We also do not want to have "cow sausages", let's better call them "beef sausages". Why don't we eat "dog" or "cat"? Well... because they are pets, aren't they?