i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Proving identity in India can sometime result in frustrating experience. If you go to Bank for opening an account, they will ask for Permanent Account Number (PAN) card issued by finance ministry of India. If you hail from low income group and want to take advantage of subsidized food provided by the government then they will ask for ration card. If you want to exercise your right as a citizen of India during various elections then they will ask for voter ID card. Furthermore, all these proof documents are not linked with each other.

I'm finally getting around to posting this link to a piece that ran in the New Yorker back in August.  The column starts out as a discussion of the considerable recent advances in encoding and cleansing music in digital form: more than ever, it is possible to enhance the depth and quality of the captured performances and to enrich the sense of the time and place of those performances while eliminating the "noise" that obscures that richness.  As bandwidth and

Most of us have heard of service dogs — but what about service horses, chimpanzees, or parrots? Should they be treated the same way under the Americans with Disabilities Act that more "typical" or "expected" service animals are? Or should there be different categories within the designation of "service animal" to determine which companions are allowed in which public places? That's the subject of this December 31, 2008 New York Times Magazine story.