Week 16- 12/6 and 12/8

Last Week of Classes!!

During our last week of class, we played around with a program called scratch. Scratch is a free program that allows the user to create animations. Learning to use it was really easy and fun. Everything is set up very organized so it is not hard at all to make an animation and is very user-friendly. We also finished up our websites and the animations we were working on the week before.

It is really hard to believe that I am almost done with my first semester of college. I really enjoyed being in Dissecting the Internet. I loved learning about the different topics and the discussions were always interesting.

Week 15- 11/29 and 12/1

I found this weeks classes very fun! We learned the basics of creating a website using xhtml and then applied them to our own webpages.  xhtml is the language that tells the webpage how to display the information. We learned how to change the colors, display a picture, add a link, and create tables. We also learned how to create animations which were a lot of fun to do. I made an animation of a person dancing. When I have more time, I would like to improve my animation, include face expressions, and make it more interesting. My brother, who is going to University of Pittsburgh, also had to create webpages for one of his classes. They used a similar program. He showed me all the different things he did with his site. I found it very interesting that there is so much variety people can do with websites by only knowing simple codes.

Week 14- 11/22

For the week of Nov. 22, we only had one class because of Thanksgiving Break!! During this class Michael Barry gave his perspectives on how the different branches and departments of government view and act in terms of cyberspace. Michael Barry served in the Marine Corps Reserve and is currently an analyst for Irregular Warfare. He also oversaw the implementation of the National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations. The perspectives that he gave us were formed from his own observations. The different perspectives and viewpoints were interesting, but also really confusing to follow.

Week 13- 11/15 and 11/17

This week we continued with our discussions about how the internet is used for social change. It is very interesting understand the connection between different topics. My topic was about how the internet is used in health care. It is fascinating all the different ways that the health care industry is using the internet. One of the things the article I read mentioned was the Visible Human Project created by the National Library of Medicine. It is a 3D representation of anatomically normal male and female that allows viewers to see MRIs and cryosectioned images of the whole body. Many medical centers now have their monitored bed forms online with real- time information so the doctors can see the information without having to physically be in the room. These programs act as a notification system for critical events. The health care professionals are utilizing these programs as well as many other aspects of the internet to improve patient care and knowledge. Another interesting topic discussed was the Suitcase project which would set up a shadow internet anywhere including repressive countries where the government shuts down communication in times of crisis.

Week 12- 11/8 and 11/10

We started off the week by talking about cloud computing and how Dr. Wilkes uses it in his bee keeping. We watched a really interesting video of a swarm of Dr. Wilkes bees. I would not want to be near them. On thursday, we started discussing the topics that we had to research. One of the topics we talked about were how hate groups use the internet. There is actually a website where you can see the different hate groups and their location in the U.S. This site also allows you to see how many hate groups are in each state. During this conversation we watched a video interview of the wife of the pastor of Westboro Baptist Church and Anonymous which was quite ridiculous. Another thing we talked about was the role of the internet in overthrowing the government in Egypt and Tunisia. People were able to organize and plan on the internet. It is amazing the number of ways the internet is used throughout the world today.

Week 11- 11/1 and 11/3

This week in Dissecting the Internet we studied crowd sourcing by playing games. On tuesday, we watched a TED talk and clips from another show about Luis van Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who uses crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is using millions of people to solve large scale problems. For example, he created CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs which are security tests to make sure that the response is by a human, but they also dual function as a way to help digitize books. Instead of wasting 10 seconds on typing a random code, people are now also being productive because they are helping solve a problem that the computer can't solve and that would take a few people hundreds of years to do. Luis van Ahn also created the ESP game which a fun game that also helps to label Google images. His newest project is called Duolingo which is a free site that teaches the user a language and also helps to translate the web into different languages. For thursday, we had to come up with our own crowdsourcing game that we would be able to play in class without a computer. My group came up with the idea of doing a human knot where everyone had to help to get the knot untangled and back in a circle. The other games were a lot of fun to play as well. In all the games, we had to use everyone's help to solve a problem.

Week 10- 10/25 and 10/27

On tuesday, we had a guest speaker from easyfish marketing which is a company that helps market others on the internet. His job is to get his costumer's companies to be one of the first three that show up when you type keywords into google. During that class, we also talked alot about QR Codes. QR codes or quick reference codes are... like below:

Companies can use them for special promotions, discounts, messages, or as a link to their website. They are starting to appear everywhere. The problem with these though is that a person can only see the message if they have a smart phone with the QR code app so they are the only ones who can get these discounts or messages. I feel like they are also a way of getting more people to buy smart phones.