The Next New Thing

The current hanging display boards in the subway stations are ok but I think they can be improved. We can have digital billboards in surrounding places and/or in subway stations that show real time information with access to current news and real time subway information of where trains are (for example spots on the map are differently colored to show what trains are currently where instead of just an estimation of how long the train will arrive at the station.) This could also be adapted onto bus stops and placed into the waiting booth for the stops.

A second thing I think can happen is since all cars have some sort of GPS system, when a police vehicle or firetruck needs to handle an emergency, a centralized GPS system would help scatter civilian vehicles to ensure authorities get to their destination asap. The system could show the path of the firetrucks to all local drivers so the drivers will know ahead of time to create a path for the firetrucks.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is self explanatory. People share computer documents/folders/games/pages of code/music through the internet. You have to find a site to upload these files or create your own server and host the files for download.

P2P file sharing is peer to peer file sharing or network to network sharing. Instead of having one dedicated server to upload files to other people, you have multiple people downloading from other completed downloads by people who are continually uploading pieces of the file to the downloader.

A prime example of P2P file sharing are torrents. You can upload a file and have many others download it from you (at the cost of your bandwidth) and then having others who downloaded your file seed the file to other people who want to download the file (at the cost of the other individual’s bandwidth). You can connect to multiple sources at once to download faster up to what is provided to you in terms of internet speed (or in some cases per amount of data). The Bittorrent effect by Clive Thompson says “It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes.” Ignoring the illegal downloading of tv shows, this way makes downloading a lot faster.

Our Class Wiki – So Far

So far I haven’t edited the wiki yet. I have been planning on reorganizing the current games that are on the wiki as ‘RTS’ ‘MOBA’ ‘FPS’ ‘MMORPG’ and probably adding in games that are considered an eSport because my paper was on eSports.

Privacy & Confidentiality

If you put anything online, it can be found. There are layers of firewalls, encryption to protect sensitive material. Those that you choose to put on the internet that isn’t part of some major industry like banking are less protected. I could type out my sensitive information on this page and it would be for everyone to see. There’s always deletion but google always has a cached page of pretty much everything.

I believe there are now laws in which you have to opt-in to public displaying information or such related things and can’t be in a situation where you have to opt-out first because you were automatically opt-in.

Advice

I don’t think Baruch is able to handle more new media. The internet is slow enough with hundreds of students using it at once. Putting that aside, I think Baruch can use twitter to announce snow days and cancellations instead of having to refresh the Baruch main page for updates with the benefit of offloading unwanted traffic to the main page to a more suited website. (Then again I don’t remember the Baruch website ever crashing).

Creativity

If there’s a place to share whatever it is you want to the world, it is through youtube. Anything you found funny or sounded cool you can copy the link and share it with pretty much anyone. When something is very popular you usually see a parody of the video sooner or later. People will take ideas from one place and more from another then edit it together for a comedic effect. “Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?” by Brooks Barnes states these mash ups will sometimes cross legal boundaries. In the case of Disney, any property of Disney is illegal to use unless authorized. However, many youtube videos with Disney property are still up and running. Each company has its own fine line for stuff like this. It is because of great products produced on one end that lets outsiders make their own creation.

VIRTUAL WORLDS

Virtual worlds can be and are already used to connect a big group of people across the world – example, mmorpgs. Second Life falls under this category. According to “Going to the virtual office in Second Life” Second Life is physically entering businesses. They plan to be the bridge for virtual meetings within businesses. Each employee gets their own avatar. Of course this comes with pros and cons. Pro: it’s unique, con: it’s unprofessional. Nothing beats face to face contact. Virtual meetings with your own live face is acceptable, but a whole new avatar just for you to meet with your co-workers is just not needed.

According to After Second Life, Can Virtual Worlds Get a Reboot? virtual worlds encourages creativity. Sure you can get creative in a whole new world, but it’s most likely not going to be applicable to the real world. You can definitely be creative in the real world and have it be applicable because people usually think within the real world. That’s the bottom line most important thing.

In the future I think virtual worlds will be so advanced that it would make real life seem fake and virtual worlds seem like real. It would be the reverse of what we have today. If not, then the virtual worlds be exactly identical to real life. If you think about it, it does get scary when you aren’t able to distinguish between the two.

BLOG ABOUT TWITTER

I think Twitter compares more to an in-class discussion than to a Blackboard discussion. You usually don’t say or can’t say that much per tweet. Questions asked by professors are most likely less than 140 characters. Student responses however, may or may not reach the 140 character limit (seriously, who counts how many characters people actually say instead of words?) There can be short discussions back and forth. Blackboard discussions can be the same as twitter discussion as long as nobody feels compelled to type a wall of text. The only thing about a blackboard discussion is that it doesn’t look and feel tuned for fast responses like twitter or an in-class discussion.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

The four sites i am going to compare are Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and tumblr.

In Tumblr you follow people just like twitter. However, there is no word limit for each post for Tumblr. You can upload pictures, videos, and audio clips to your account or share it with others.

In Reddit you post threads and respond to others. You get karma points (aka internet points with no physical value) for each upvote. This is to show if people agree with you or not.

In Twitter you are limited to the amount of characters per post and usually include a #hashtag at the end of your tweet.

In Facebook you have to add friends in order to see what others put on their account unless privacy options are tuned so that everybody can see stuff.

I like Reddit more than the other three. There’s a range of serious posts to funny posts that make it to the front page. It’s a nice variety everyday. You can always go to the appropriate subreddit if you want to see similar kinds of threads.

SOCIAL NETWORKING

What are some ways (corporate and otherwise) that these technologies can be used? What are the benefits of these technologies to society? Be specific. Is there a “dark side”? Make sure to include your opinion of the way these technologies might evolve in the future.

Social networking is usually used for connecting with other people. As said in “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting“, Professional recruiters are using sites such as Linkedin to find potential employees. The benefits of social networking technology is convenience and ease of access to people.

There is a downside social networking. You don’t get to meet face to face (most of the time) while using technology. According to “Antisocial Networking?“, researchers have yet to determine whether or not these types of online interactions are on the same level as talking face to face. If researchers are on this, then it can be important – we will just have to wait for the results. Maybe if talking through social networks isn’t of the same quality then we might start to see the re-implementation of video in combination to what exists. Example – sending a ‘video text’ instead of just typing.