FIT Milestone #4: Search enginge techniques I never learned!
How is it that I never knew about logical operators and parentheses to narrow searches in google or other search engines? I have been using them for years and I was never taught nor thought to ask how to pinpoint the exact information that I was looking for. I probably could have saved myself alot of time and frustration navigating the internet and sifting through thousands of web pages if I had known how to narrow my searches. I was always one to say “the internet is supposed to make things easier and open a world of information to you, but it seems like you can never find what it is that you are looking for, at least not easily.” Now, I have to admit that this could just be a result of my lack of fluency, not because technology is not user-friendly. I remember in high school we had a library science class where the teacher spent countless hours teaching us how to use the dewey decimal system other archaeic research methods. Never once did she teach us how to use google or yahoo search engines to conduct narrow searches. In fact, I don’t even think she used them frequently, although it isn’t like they hadn’t been around for years already. That should have been part of her job description. I do remember her teaching us about EPSCO Host, which is in fact a very useful database that connects many libraries and helps narrow searches to academic articles and books. However, the teacher never let us do it ourselves, she just talked about it. How is one expected to learn how to do effective web-searches if they never practice them? Because she did not actively engage the class, I remember tuning her out when she started talking about the EPSCO Hose because I had never seen it or used it, so how was I supposed to conceptualize it and apply the techniques she was telling us? I completely forgot about EPSCO Host until college when another teacher reintroduced it to me in an interactive way.
A funny story about search engines and ranking the relevance of pages to your search: In high school, we were assigned a two-page paper on the Amistad for our Government class. Everyone did the paper the night before and handed it in the next day, because it was a brand new teacher and I suppose no one took her seriously. The papers all come back with F’s because the teacher realized something: almost every single student in the class had plagorized part or all of a particular online encyclopedia entry on the Amistad, probably because it was the first page that came up when you typed “Amistad” into google! Everyone had to take a zero, and we were in serious trouble. That taught me something: never underestimate a new teacher or boss or person in a position of authority, and, adults knew more about the internet than we had thought at that age. The teacher immediately gained the respect of the students, and everyone felt extremely guilty, but we all learned that only using the first article or so that comes up in a search may not always provide you with the best, most in-depth, and certainly in this case, the most original material. Sometimes one might have to insert particular phrases in quotation marks or search for two words related to a topic using the (AND) conjunction in bold between the words in the search box.
Digital Nugget #4: Chinese bloggers crying out for help?
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/09/26/china.blog.reut/index.html
I found an article on CNN.com saying that, “The number of blog sites in China reached 34 million in August, a 30-fold increase from four years ago, state media said on Tuesday, despite a series of curbs on media and dissent.”
The article goes on to say that the Chinese government is censoring these blogs, and monitoring them for words such as “freedom” and “democracy”. On a side note, I found the language in one section of the article to be rather strong and opinion-laced for a “news story”, but then again, who ever said that news medium weren’t biased?
“The Chinese government, obsessed with maintaining Communist Party rule, routinely monitors online chat forums and bulletin boards for controversial political comment…”
I kind of felt that the word “obsessed” was a bit too strong to use here, even if the author thinks it to be true. I mean, is it really anything new that the Chinese government is Communist and does not like talk of democracy and freedom? No, not really, and the U.S. doesn’t seem to have a problem trading with China even though they have been, currently are, and probably will continue to be a communist nation. We are so picky and choosy with who we apply sanctions to. At any rate, the author should not have used this language in a news story! This was not a Lou Dobbs column.
Anyhoo, back to my IT point…many sites have been closed by the Chinese government because they apparently had too much bashing of communism, etc., and apparently this is newsworthy to the U.S. because the Chinese are, in fact, communists and we don’t like that here. But doesn’t the U.S. practice similar behaviors?
Students and employees in the U.S. have recently been punished for speaking negatively about teachers or bosses on blogs or other forums for free speech, like MySpace. We just had an online discussion board about the internet and the 4th ammendment, and it seems that little privacy exists online, or, little rights to free speech if you might “hurt your teacher’s or boss’s feelings” by saying nasty things about them in an online forum.
Are Chinese bloggers trying to cry for help in their blogs that can be read throughout the world? Are they trying to tell us that they want to be free? Maybe some are, but the CNN article also says that 70% of the blogs in China are dormant, or haven’t been changed for over a month. Does this show indifference, or fear that they will be monitored or prosecuted by the government?
FIT Milestone #3
This week’s Snyder reading was very informative, although slightly abstract. I feel that nothing really sunk in because I think for something like html programming, hands-on learning would be the most effective. I am looking forward to the fluency lab on Thursday and seeing how they are going to teach us how to program!
I think the thing from the chapter that made me feel more FIT was the information on the three colors usedin html, or red, green, and blue. My question was answered as to why these three colors were used instead of the traditional primary colors red, blue, and yellow. It is because of the color sensors in the human eye! I found this to be very interesting, especially because not only did I learn something more about IT, I learned something about the human body as well!
As far as becoming frustrated because I am not FIT enough, I cannot seem to figure out how to easily put the blogroll urls into my blog!! I subscribed to bloglines, but I guess I am going to have to get some in-class help in figuring out this part!
Digital nugget #3: Internet gambling vs. Illegal filesharing
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/11/17/60minutes/main1052420.shtml
After the football games on CBS tonight, 60 Minutes aired a rerun of a show they did last fall including interviews with Howard Stern and Bill Romanowski, and a special report on the internet gambling industry. I remembered watching the report the first time around and thinking, “Yeah, there is alot of money to be made if the government would just regulate and tax the industry.” A similar argument could be made for legalizing marijuana.
Well, it got me thinking about our conversation in class last Thursday about illegal downloading and filesharing and whatnot, and something that was said by one of the founders of TV’s World Series of Poker struck me.
“At a big convention of the international gambling industry in Las Vegas, there was an entire pavilion dedicated to Internet gaming. Many of the top executives attended, despite the fact that their business is illegal in the U.S.
“So why doesn’t the FBI or justice department make arrests at the convention?
“The Justice Department says ‘We have lots of other priorities,’ and they’re right,” says Steve Lipscomb, the founder and CEO of the “World Poker Tour” TV show, which helped fuel the craze for Internet gambling.”
I seem to remember in class that we had discussed the government going after people who steal music and other intellectual property, and it got me wondering why they would sue people “to make an example” out of them, but not go after another internet industry that promotes gambling. If they don’t have time to crack down on internet gambling or look into regulating and controlling it, but they have time to go after pre-teen music stealers, then I wonder where their priorities really lie? With the public, who, like the 60 Minutes report stated, could be severely affected by gambling addictions, or with multi-millionaires and billionaire members of the music industry, who I’m sure use one form of influence or another to ensure that the “Napster” crackdown happened in the first place.
Apparently, the online gambling business has incredible money-making potential as well. If the feds want to protect the rights of artists and record-labels not to have their intellectual property stolen because of who knows what kind of incentive, then they should want to regulate the internet gamling industry, especially since many states have legalized some or all forms of regulated, taxed gambling. They could make alot of money on “sin taxes” from internet gamblers.
“There’ll be more online poker games per day at the end of this year than all of the casinos in the entire world put together. It’s a huge business,” says Nigel Payne, who runs Sportingbet, one of the world’s biggest online gambling companies.”
Maybe the internet gambling crackdown is coming, because the poker craze and online gambling phenomenon is relatively new. But I also wonder, just like internet gambling providers can serve people who don’t live in the U.S., can’t files still be shared illegally in other countries or can’t bootleggers set up offshores? Maybe they can’t; I’m not FIT enough to really know for sure but it just got me thinking and wondering about it…
Digital nugget #2 : Is “Smart Learning” the wave of the future?
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/09/07/school.of.future.ap/index.html
This article on Philadelphia School District’s appeal to Microsoft to design a school with integrated technology and new approaches to learning suggests a whole new approach for the application of technology in secondary education. Bill Gates has called the high school structure “obselete”, and he may be on to something. The new “smart school” uses some aspects of technology that many universities have already adopted, such as the use of smart boards in lieu of traditional blackboards.
One of the most important learning approaches of the new school is the incorporation of current events into learning applications. As the article says,
“Lessons will have more incorporation of current events to teach subjects. For instance, a question of whether Philadelphia is safe from the avian flu will teach students about geography, science and history.
“Learning is not just going to school,” said Shirley Grover, the school’s energetic principal who came from the American School in Milan, Italy. “Learning is equal to life.”
This new approach is incredibly important for hands-on, practical applications to learning, and one of the new innovations that might prove successful ifor students’ comprehension of their lessons. If they can see them in action, they might actually sink in!
“Two things are quite intriguing — the willingness of the district and Microsoft to try something different,” Lynch said. He cautioned, however, that while trying new methods may be valuable “we have to be careful because you’re messing with kids’ lives.”
Lynch champions innovation in education, which is definitely something that can prove successful in the partnership of technology and administrative organizations like the Philadelphia School District. But, he warns of the unpredictable affect that these new techniques can have on children. Will they be more confused as they try to learn “too much at once”, or will they be better adapted because their education will incorporate many aspects of their lives and surroundings, like computers, current events, and social interactions? Will the students be given too much autonomy instead of structed classroom settings and lesson plans, and in turn become lazy and indifferent, or will the new structure give them greater sovereignty and control over their learning and comprehension? It will be interesting to see how the Philadelphia school handles these complex questions!
FIT Milestone #1
I realized after getting over my initial feelings of disgust towards the act of blogging that it actually is a useful outlet. Especially after reviewing the case with Trent Lott’s PR blunder and how the outrage it caused only surfaced after bloggers and independent online magazines pressed the issue for a week after the initial comments were made. I was also surprised to learn that Peter Jennings is an obsessive blog reader, and I realized that blogging is an important outlet for public opinion in countless pertinent issues and debates. This revelation changed my opinion of blogging, although I still beleive that some bloggers are self-centered and feel that their opinions are so worthy of being shared with the world, even if they would probably be considered mundane by many websurfers.
While looking over the Snyder readings, I realized that the assertion made in Chapter 2 that IT techniques are learned from experience is incredibly true. I firmly beleive that fluency in IT cannot be taught without extensive hands-on training. For example, the section on “netiquette” in Chapter 12 that dealt with emoticons and YELLING IN CAPITAL LETTERS reverted me back to the days when I first created an AOL screenname and started IMing random people. One quickly learned the language of chatting online, and how to convey emotions through symbols and acronyms like LOL (laughing out loud). Noone ever taught people these things, they were learned through experimentation and networking of the users of this new medium. The new technology created a new language, much like I mentioned in our group project last week. The new language consists of acronyms, symbols, and so on that are learned from experience, such as how we learned to speak English, or whatever our first language might be. One doesn’t normally learn IT speak and techniques like they learn Spanish in high school, from books and such. The Snyder book kind of seems wierd to me in this sense…why spell it all out in a text book if hands-on learning is so much better in IT?
Finally, I beleive that the first labs were very effective teaching tools. It was a great example of why hand-on learning is so important and effective. I even learned alot during my own group’s presentation. Since we had little time due to the holiday weekend, we split the chapter and worked on our own sections. I definitely learned alot from Jonathan about the “primary” colors used in digital images, for example! The importance of hands-on learning made even more sense when Doc talked to us about the digital divide and service learning programs to teach those who had never used a computer how to do the most basic things, like click a mouse on a particular icon, which is something that seems second nature to us. In a way, it would feel like being a occupational therapist teaching somebody how to eat or read again following an accident, because familarity with computers is something that many of us take for granted.
Digital nugget #1
During the Cold War, Canada’s National Optics Institute developed a system to detect which type of enemy tank or fighter jet was approaching. After the Soviet Union’s demise, such threats were deemed less likely, and the technology sat on the shelf.
Until 2003, when entrepreneur Eric Bergeron toured the institute with September 11 on his mind.
“The flash I had was that we no longer look for Russian planes in the sky, but we do look for bad things in luggage,” Bergeron said.
The X-ray analysis company that emerged, Quebec-based Optosecurity Inc., is only on the verge of putting its devices in real-life checkpoints. But its hopes are emblematic of the massive homeland security technology industry spawned by September 11.
Contrary to the promises from technologists that began almost immediately after the attacks, these five years have seen few dramatic security improvements. But the market remains a source of riches — real for some companies, still largely dreamed-of for others — primed with billions of dollars from the U.S. and international governments.
Spending on domestic security across all U.S. federal agencies is expected to reach $58 billion in fiscal 2007 — up from $16.8 billion in 2001, according to the Office of Management and Budget. States and cities are annually contributing $20 billion to $30 billion more, Gartner Inc. Vice President T. Jeff Vining estimates.
Much of it lands with large defense contractors and systems integrators with long government ties and the heft to tackle huge projects. For example, Unisys Corp. got a $1 billion contract to set up computers, cell phones, Web sites and other network technology for airport security staff. BearingPoint Inc. won a $104 million deal in August to provide secure identification cards to federal employees and contractors.
Still, a lot of no-names are angling for a piece. Even a tiny slice could be revolutionary for them.
Surveillance technologies
When Salient Stills Inc. was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder Laura Teodosio figured its software — which enhances the quality of frames captured from video, making them clearer to publish or analyze — would find its biggest success with media companies.
But after September 11, the FBI became a user, and Salient Stills’ customer focus shifted to law enforcement.
Today, revenue is less than $5 million, but it has increased every year. Teodosio credits the explosion in surveillance footage being captured by authorities and by regular people.
Optosecurity is at an earlier stage, having gotten only initial funding for upcoming trial deployments of its gear at North American airports.
Using the optical-recognition technology licensed from the Canadian institute, Optosecurity’s devices attach to existing X-ray machines and are programmed to automatically spot weapons or their components. (Optosecurity will not say how many items it can recognize.)
“There is not a lot of money that has trickled down to startups,” Bergeron conceded. “But the problem is that now (government customers) are running out of innovation. If you look at the checkpoint now, it is the same as the checkpoint 10 years ago, and the checkpoint 20 years ago.”
Some measure of technology’s limited impact since September 11 can be gleaned from the Department of Homeland Security’s budget request for 2007.
DHS cited 25 “key accomplishments” in the three years since it corralled 22 federal agencies, but most of the victories surrounded organizational changes or improved use of resources.
Only three items linked technology to better September 11-style safety. One celebrated the rise of a data-sharing network that routes secret information among 56 federal sites.
The other two related to a single program, US-VISIT, which incorporates biometrics and machine-readable passports to tighten border control. DHS touted this about the program: Of the 44 million foreign visitors it had processed, US-VISIT had detected 950 people with criminal histories or immigration violations.
Emerging market
Requests for future technology initiatives, meanwhile, were more numerous. For example, DHS sought $692 million for explosive detection devices, $157 million for radiation monitors and $5 million to upgrade the satellite capabilities of the emergency alert system.
“The themes around much of the successes involving technology have been relatively basic at this point,” said Greg Baroni, who heads the federal business for Unisys. “I see this as an emerging market. The large, advanced, state-of-the-art technologies are still being explored.”
Even this basic phase has been pivotal for Unisys. Before September 11, Unisys’ federal business was so weak that the company was trying to sell it. Now the unit has doubled to nearly $1 billion a year, about $400 million of which comes from homeland security contracts. The group had 1,200 employees in 2001, but now has nearly 4,000.
Helena Wisniewski has worked in homeland security from multiple angles: At the CIA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, defense contractors and a biometrics company she founded. Now an administrator at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Wisniewski says innovations in the post-September 11 tech market have been limited because of the pressures to get basic technologies in place quickly.
That environment also shoehorned some ideas into places they didn’t work. Witness the rush to use facial-recognition biometrics to scan crowds for evildoers, even though the access-control technology was built for settings where people present themselves one at a time under good lighting.
“It’s very difficult in a lot of circumstances to reduce a technology to practice in six months,” she said. “We haven’t really organized to sit back and look at an effective strategy for the longer term. I think we need an overall strategy, not just tactical solutions.”
Gartner’s Vining says the most successful security technologies so far have been improved communications systems and networks for information sharing. Police and intelligence agents have also benefited from new data-mining programs, he believes.
Several analysts expect the next wave to make more use of chemical, biological and radiological sensors, which figure to play a role in a $2 billion border security contract to be awarded shortly. Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., LM Ericsson and Raytheon Co. are seeking prime-contractor status on the deal.
Brian Ruttenbur, homeland security analyst for Morgan Keegan & Co., is also watching companies that help analyze intercepted communications and those that manage video surveillance.
Of course, even as technologies improve, none is likely to end the post-September 11 era of hyper vigilance.
“We can’t catch everything,” Ruttenbur said. “I don’t know of any single technology that can be right 100 percent of the time.”
This article was on CNN.com. One part that I found particularly interesting was when the article mentioned that only now are the promises made since 9/11 to improve homeland security, especially in airports using new technologies, being carried out. If the technology was already available since it had been developed during the Cold War, why wasn’t it more quickly implemented into the airports, especially with high risk levels like New York and London. I guess I am just frustrated with the amount of time it takes for change to happen, probably partly due to bureaucratic restraints, but especially because technology is supposed to make things more “efficient” and it isn’t even given enough funding to start to make a difference! It is good that basic techologies were employed quickly after 9/11, but one would think that the pressure to develop better technologies would exist in the Homeland Security circles.
First Post
this is my first post on my blog…im actually a little mad i never really wanted to be a person who had a blog, i always thought blogs were a little self-indulgent…..like who really cares what i think everyday i know i dont really care to read what other people think every single day….maybe you dont have to write on it everyday though….o well now im even geekier for having a blog! no offense to you bloggers out there…im just a computer moron hopefully i will become more “fluent” by the end of this semester!!
Branching out
Well, I started out on Blogger, and then I decided to take a risk and set up my blog on WordPress instead, since I heard that there was many more options in aesthetics and what-not. I am going to copy my first two posts from Blogger, which only consist of my first post and my first digital nugget…
