Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is a concept that has emerged and become visible in the eye of the media in recent years. Cyberbullying is exactly what it sounds like, bullying or mistreating someone through the internet. Unfortunately, due to advancements in technology, bullying over the internet has become a lot easier. As read in Girl's Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies, the application that can be downloaded on many smart phones called Kik led a girl to commit suicide. This recently popular app allows users to message back and forth via the internet as well as share pictures and files. As apps such as Kik emerge it only gives bullies different pathways to mistreat and terrorize others.

Legal and Ethical Issues

I personally feel that information and multimedia should be paid for due to the fact that people spend countless hours putting in time and effort to create these things. Making an album of music or writing a detailed and well researched journal are not easy tasks and should be covered by copyright laws so that the author or artist can receive some type of monetary payment for their hard work. Open Access can be classified as things that are free and open to the public for usage. I thought that YouTube did a pretty good job at making sure copyright laws were enforced on videos that did not give credit to the artist who's song they may have used in a video. However, in YouTube Alters Copyright Algorithms, Will "Manually" Review Some Claims, we see that the site will now manually look through videos that have been flagged for copyright infringement. This is mostly due to the fact that the first lady's speech was wrongfully flagged after having just aired. If it was not such a notable figure in society, the site would have probably kept allowing their programs to flag videos that violate copyright laws.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

1. I personally do not believe that robots can do everything that humans can do. Although robots may be extremely developed and programmed with exact specifications, machine error is often too common with elevated levels of technology such as robots. Not all human function can be programmed into a machine, therefore robots are not exactly capable of performing every task that a human can.

2. Robotic and driverless cars are a strange phenomenon to think about, however, we may see them sooner than we think. In Driverless Cars Get California License one can read about how driverless cars have recently been approved by DMVs in California. Driverless cars have the upper hand when it comes to reacting quickly and avoiding accidents. There is no distraction from the radio or a cell phone, therefore all attention is aimed at the road and hazards that may come about on one's journey from point A to point B.

3. Between humans and robots, I personally feel that humans are more likely to make mistakes due to the fact that it is human nature. Robots are programmed to do the same task or set of tasks over and over in the same routine each time. A major problem that may occur is when the robot does make a mistake, who will be to blame? In Should we put robots on trial? the topic of who will be to blame is heavily discussed. The person who created the robot would seem to be responsible, however, the robot is operational by itself. Maybe one day in the future we will see a separate justice system for robots, or have them incorporated into ours. 

Creativity and Social Media

check out my video!

This was one of the first videos I ever made so it may be a little rough around the edges. I used Microsoft Movie Maker and played with the settings in order to add music and text to the video. For safety purposes this video was conducted in an enclosed lot and we did have permission from the owners to partake in the above activities. Hope you all enjoy!

Social Media

1.) I, personally, am on two social networking sites; Facebook and Twitter. Originally I preferred Facebook due to the fact that the majority of people I knew communicated using it. However, in recent days I am noticing that a large quantity of my Facebook friends are switching over to the world of Twitter. I feel as if someday soon Facebook will turn into MySpace and become non-existent.

2.) Virtual worlds are basically a life that people live through the internet by ways of social media, blogging, etc. Virtual worlds allow people to share their life experiences and events with others all over the world if they choose to do so. Virtual worlds can be used for entertainment, education, communication, and a myriad of other things. In Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class - via Twitter we see how Twitter and social media in general can be used for educational purposes by way of discussion boards and out of class communication. Aside from education, social media and virtual worlds allow communication of important news to be spread quickly and effectively. The article How can we Measure the Influence of the Blogosphere? covers many different aspects of blogging but in particular I wanted to focus on the part of the article regarding the news and mass media. Many times big news events are tweeted or blogged about before the coverage of the story airs on the news. This effectively allows information to be communicated instantly and for people to "stay in the loop" much easier. In my virtual world I would like to have a combination of news, entertainment, and education.

World Wide Web

I feel as if the World Wide Web's future will hold much of the same that we have already seen with improvements being made to websites, enabling users a more custom experience. In Facebook search: Facebook adding search feature, we see how sites are making it easier for users to browse, search, and find what they are looking for in a timely fashion. The web offers entertainment, information, tutorials, and a plethora of other things that help users every day that will only continue to improve as time goes on.

"The cloud" is a storage and computing device for various websites and services. Data is backed up using "the cloud" so that information is not stored on personal devices which takes up a large amount of space. The only problem with this type of system is when there is an outage. As read in "The Cloud" Challenges Amazon, on Christmas Eve of last year Amazon's cloud service was subject to trouble with elastic load balancing which caused Netflix to go down for a large portion of the day. Although services like the cloud are convenient, it is going to take a number of years to perfect these systems in order for them to work perfectly.

drink up