i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

In the following blog, I would like to talk about examples of cultural categorization, in the form of abstraction and imagery representations found in languages.  In specific, I would like to draw several examples from the Russian language.

This blog entry is an example of cultural categorization systems and how embodied language and culture can cause conflicts.

My extended family owns rice noodle factories in San Francisco that serve many of the Asian restaurants.  For the past year they have been having to deal with a new law that has put their noodle factories in jeopardy.   The reasons for this conflict stem from cultural categorization issues. 

Guy Deutscher writes an interesting article asking "how our mother tongue really shapes our experience of the world". He inquires about categories in the most abstract sense, by exploring whether our mother tongues "oblige" us to think in a certain way because of the constraints of the mother tongue itself.

In the age of information huge datasets aren't hard to come by. Everyone is trying to make sense of the rampant information made available to them. One of the largest (at least in terms of potential size) datasets to be analyzed is — somewhat ironically — the universe. It's big. 

Last week, NYT featured Julius Eulberg, a German who loves collecting antiques, especially porcelain birds. This piece made me think of Kimra's chapter-- especially the part about retrieving the chair. Can you imagine having to fetch one of his 300 + birds? How would he describe it in order for you know which porcelain bird he was talking about?

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.

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.

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that.