Our Society

Many believe that it is the Law that protects our freedom.  I think the law itself does not protect us, but a combination of the law with various consequences for actions, and human nature.  If there is a guideline set that is standard, most people will choose to obey it.  At the beginning of our country, the ethical code of the people became the law, but as time has gone on (hundreds of years), society and it's values change.  We are in the midst of that change, where things we thought would never be "OK" and now deemed "OK" and "not a big deal" by the majority of society.  It's a dangerous world, and now with the law not keeping us from doing things we know are wrong, what does?  Our own code of ethics.  When it comes down to it, we are our best filters and governors.  If we don't want to see something everybody else is seeing, we can turn away and "filter" it out.  If we don't want to do something everybody else is doing, most often we can refuse to do it.  We have the ability to see right from wrong, and we have the ability to make choices.  Like Smokey the Bear, we are also the only ones who can prevent the wildfires that would destroy our morals within our own souls.

Tweeting Conference

I had an interesting experience this weekend.  I decided to "tweet" during General Conference.  I normally wouldn't do such a thing due to my lack of a twitter, but I consented and tried it out.  It was a positive experience for me, one in which I was able to better pay attention to the speakers by tweeting my thoughts and the cool quotes I heard.  It caused me to want to write things down too, so for the first time in my life, I took "good" notes during conference.  Most of the time I would tweet from my phone, so while I was at the conference center (I was there for two sessions) I never really got distracted by having my phone out for more than a few seconds.  At home though, I was able to read through the tweets about it during the sessions, it helped a lot especially when I missed a quote or something.  While at the Conference Center though, I wouldn't be able to keep track of the feed, but I would get notifications as people tweeted directly at me about them, "favorited" them, or "retweeted" them.  It was a good time.  I paid better attention than most of my family, and got significantly more out of it than I would have without doing it.

MMORPG's!

I love playing video games.  I like to play all sorts of them! When I was younger, I didn't need a friend to play with me.  I would play for extensive periods of time solving puzzles, beating bad guys, and finishing different games.  I would arise early to play, as well as go to bed late because I was playing them.  This I did purely for the fun of playing, and the sheer wonder of the creation of them, the stories they held, and the experience I had while playing.  But now, I cannot really sit and play a video game by myself.  I'm not all that sure why, I just become sick of them after awhile, and I need to share the experience with someone.  Even the MMORPG's.  I now normally play with a group of friends, either in my neighborhood, or my best "buds" from across town.  We make memories playing them and have more inside jokes than I can list on all my fingers and toes!  I get too bored very quickly while by myself.  Some of my relatives however, are hooked.  Everything in their schedule that is not the game, revolves around the time set aside to play the game.  It's very destructive, and I'm very worried about them.  Their habit is similar to what I used to have, but more extreme (don't get me wrong, I still love playing video games).  Somehow I recognized that real life can be better, and they have yet to realize what they are cheating themselves out of.  I now go to spend time with them and show them what life can really do for you.

Internet Piracy!

Behavior

People fascinate me.  Whether they are arguing, working together, or suffering together, they fascinate me.  They are always progressing in one form or another and are discovering new things.  But how does society change?  Clay Shirky said that "Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors."  So it doesn't matter what technology you've got, the people cause the revolution through their behaviors.  I read a lot about how technology has been used to further our race, and how it has been the critical tool for accomplishing certain feats that have gone down in history or have changed the course of a nation.  It wasn't because of the technology, it was by the technology that this was accomplished.  The need and desire was there, the technology just made it faster and more possible than before.  Clay Shirky also said that the future of our people is on the shoulders of those who take the present for granted.  It is true, because they will seek innovation because nothing seems new to them.  But it won't be any easy change, Douglas Adams said this about the views of society:

"I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

It is always a constant struggle, as time goes on, new things happen, and revolutions and protests are accomplished that lead to better lives.  After reading about a lot of success stories of change in the past ten years, they couldn't have happened any earlier.  The technology to accomplish it didn't exist, but the desire did.  Technology didn't cause the people to revolt/evolve, they did it because of the same reasons they always did.

Technology, guided by God?

One of the most interesting things I've ever seen is the rapid advancement of technology.  It seems that once a need arises, it is quickly solved by some advancement in technology inadvertently.  My favorite example of this is the Granite Vault (used for storing billions of genealogical records) in Salt Lake City for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  It seems like every time they hit a rut/divot in the road when it comes to storing the records, a new advancement was made, and once they outgrew that, another was made!  It's incredible!  The Lord really cares about the affairs of man, and if he wants something done, he's going to get it done.  He works in mysterious ways that are also sometimes small and simple.  Technology can be one of those mysterious ways, and how people use it could be the small and simple ones.  There is a plan for each of us, and the Lord is definitely guiding it. So, I would not be opposed to the idea of The Lord need hover-boards and flying cars to continue his work.

Open Sesame!

Redundancy is annoying.  I'm very forgetful, and oftentimes will lose a homework assignment, when I do, it really stinks, because I have to do it all again from scratch.  And being the procrastinator I am and already having a lot of homework, it's very difficult and lame.  I already did it once and learned what I needed to learn, so why should I have to do it again? Open source code exists for this very reason.  It helps programmer in a professional setting and prevents them from wasting time and allows people to share their work with the world.  However, I don't think everything should be open source, because then people would stop making money, and then the market for computers and programs would die (or be really maimed).  This would be caused by the lack of desire to improve and maintain them would disappear.  So we need both.  But what should be open source, and what shouldn't?  That's a very tough question.  Very tough.  A simplistic and cheesy answer suggests that anything not already being commercially advertised.  Or even simple code that just helps write some functions that can be kind of tricky, but I don't really know.  I'm just grateful some people do!  Because it makes my (professional) life easier and prevents me from making the "I love <3 redundancy!" mistake.  So, we need both kinds of code to make the world go round!

Indexing!

For years, my mother and grandmother have been nearly addicted to Indexing (we like to call it "She's doing Dead People again!").  It's a good thing though, because it means there is less for me to do later, and I'm hoping they finish before they depart into the next life.  And even if they don't finish, my older sister is going to take the "mantle" of the Family History work, well, we will make her take the mantle.  This mantle will be pretty easy to bear though, especially because recently I've been exposed to numerous articles summing up the advances in the FamilySearch.org, and now the sight is extremely easy to use and convenient   To most people this might appear as news, but my family and I have been accustomed to these changes since they came out.  However, the new way to use your family tree is quite fascinating.  My Dad currently has an enormous family tree printout on one of our walls.  He filled the wall until he couldn't fit anymore, that would have taken a thousand pages or so.  But one of my young cousins tore half of it off the wall when he became curious as to how it was being held on.  But with the new way that FamilySearch.org organizes your tree, he can even color code it.  It might not be able to fit as much information up as he had before, but at least it will be more readable.  It's amazing, simply amazing, and I know our ancestors are extremely happy with the advances made and being made.

Copycat

This post is property of Thomas Wilkinson, and is a trademark of the fictitious company Thomas Wilkinson Productions. Copy-write laws and Internet Piracy are a big deal in the world we live in today. Not only do you read about it online in various places but it's creeping into our lives.  A couple Sundays ago, I was in a hall meeting with the men on my floor.  The RA was conducting.  We played this little game, where if we agreed with something, we would be on one side of the room, and if we didn't, the other. One of the statements proposed that internet piracy was alright.  Most of the room disagreed, but some agreed.  The ones who agreed looked us in the eye and asked which of us hadn't participated in it at all, and we should practice what we preach.  I stood there happy, never having to deal with it, but I was astonished as I looked around and saw my friends looking ashamedly down at their feet.  It reminded me of the movie Transformers in which there is a computer nerd that gets arrested.  When he is interrogated, he starts asking about the crimes he committed that caused him to be arrested.  He says: "Sure, I've downloaded a few thousand songs, but, who hasn't?!" This statement is more true than we realize.  This is a serious issue, but, who is the issue serious for?  The companies who own the music freak out about it, but they themselves are also stealing from those who actually created the music or creative work that is being pirated.  It's a two-sided coin full of hypocrites...

Twitter and Disease Outbreaks

I read an article that says that Twitter can be used to track Disease Outbreaks.  While not a lot of useful information for such a thing comes out of twitter, everybody on twitter like to complain that they are sick or can't go into work etc. and some people even have GPS locations attached to their tweets.  This gives researchers a very good resource so they can see when multiple people from an area start tweeting about the same symptoms.  They can monitor the progression of the disease by seeing from which locations the tweets come from over time.  But sometimes people complain but do not have a location attached, so such information can often be found from their profile.  The article says though that some people will mess the surveys up will traveling or if on their homepage it says that they are located in: "Somewhere in my imagination" or in "Gondor, Middle-Earth" etc.  So sometimes it's tricky, and the researchers don't get nearly as much information as they wanted to, but with what they have they can potentially help a lot with.  One of these ways is when they are tracking a disease they can tell Twitter about it and they can send a kind of warning message to everybody telling them about the progression so as to prevent so many people from getting sick.  While such a power could potentially be abused, I have faith that the Researchers at BYU will not abuse the power they have discovered.

Article: http://news.byu.edu/archive13-jan-twitter.aspx

Remain watchful!

People can be so ignorant and arrogant.  They assume that because they do not know something exists, then it does not.  A tricky statement, but very true.  This happened in the book The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.  The people in the book refused to learn about the existence of computer insecurity, and so they assumed it just didn't exist.  To those who did learn to believe, most of them assumed nothing bad would ever happen to them.  I like to sit back and laugh at how foolish they were, but at the same time, I fall victim to the very same thing.  I assume that bad things won't happen to me, and so I'm often not prepared or I haven't taken the necessary precautions to protect myself from harm.  Sometimes it is monetarily or time expensive to do so, and so these people in the book who were the victims of the hacks were justified in their course of action until disaster hit. Now suddenly the disaster has hit, and all of a sudden it is a lot more expensive to fix the damage than it would have been to prevent it from ever happening.  While we as humans see this all the time--and it happens to us a lot individually--we still sometimes fail to grasp this concept of being prepared. Don't waste too many hours protecting yourself from hackings and other such attacks.  The author spent too much time chasing down this hacker, and while the ends may have justified the means, he almost lost his job, his relationship with his girlfriend, and the many other things that should be more prominent in our lives.  We need to look out for ourselves, always keeping one eye looking forward and one eye looking back.  We must always remain wary.

Women and Computers

Why don't we see too many women in the Computer Science field?  The question doesn't make a whole lot of sense because, in my family, there are a lot of Computer Science majors.  I have six sisters, and a third of them (two) are CS majors, and my younger sister might do it as well (so that would be half of them).  So to me it has always seemed normal.  But why?  Well, I read the article called Women, Mathematics, and Computing by Paul De Pamla. He spoke a lot about how he thought it was because CS isn't a very mature field, and not as precise as mathematics, etc. and he proposed a way to fix it by making it more like mathematics and like.  However, my older sister Melissa hates math.  She hates it so much, in fact, she detests it and she can hardly stand to look at it.  Why is she a CS major then?  Well, I believe it's attributed to her creative and puzzle-solving nature.  Even as a young girl Melissa (and my other two sisters who are doing or might do CS) loved puzzles.  Melissa would work into the night on these huge puzzles of 1000+ pieces.  Why?  Because she loved it!  A puzzle can be solved many ways, put together different pieces at a time, but it still looks and works the same at the very end regardless of the approach, but different approaches are faster than others.  This is very similar to programming, which is what I think drove them to it.  So the question is still open.  The women in CS are growing, but so are the men, and maybe the men are just growing faster.  I don't think the studies have gone far enough to figure out why.  It might even be because of the quality of the men in the field.  One of my CS teachers once said (talking to the women): "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CCsQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.95.812%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&rct=j&q=DePalma%2C%20%22Why%20Women%20Avoid%20Computer%20Science%22&ei=TZuzTLreKoeisQOx37yzCA&usg=AFQjCNHmZ1QHV0_ugH64A2qDh7o3oEwoSg&sig2=WP8JIFLGG5yDnhz9vgn_4w&cad=rja  (the link to download the pdf of the article)

Google and Security

When the Government demands information from Google, Google yields 88% of the time.  Interesting huh?  We could be under investigation and not even know it!  I read that there are certain pieces of information that they do not give up / cannot give up to them.  Although, if the Government wants to get traffic information about you, or what you have queried, then they need a search warrant, the same privacy that applies to the documents in your own home also apply to your online documents.  The same measures are required to obtain them if they can be obtained at all.  It's interesting. The Government is reaching farther and farther into companies, which in turn leads the Government's hand to reach into people's lives.  It's an intriguing idea, one that I'm not sure will ever stop growing.  It's the nature of our Government right now.  I think they have good intentions, and it's a smart idea, but it needs to be controlled, before our world turns into I-Robot or Eagle Eye....


http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/google-celebrates-data-privacy-day-discussing-its-practice-turning-over-data-government_698164.html

Spooky Camera

Every time I stop and ponder the mystery and seemingly magic powers of computers and cell phones, I always end up thinking about just how far they've come since they were first invented.  I wasn't alive to see the first one, and I won't be alive to see the last either.  This mindset and set of ideas got me wandering the internet looking for news about cell phones, and I came across something rather interesting.  Apparently, the high definition camera in the iPhone 4S is the same camera that is used by Predator Drones.  Yikes!  These cameras record about one terabyte of information per day.  This camera's name is: "Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System" or ARGUS-IS for short.  But this camera is actually the result of putting 368 cell phone camera's together.  This camera is also what they call the best surveillance camera in the whole world.  It's a little creepy, isn't it?  The same camera that you may very well be taking pictures with is also taking pictures in enemy territory.  It makes me feel closer to the battlefield, but in a very odd way.  Another thing, what if they start monitoring these cameras? They will be able to see what you see.  I know this is poppycock, considering the fact that it's probably against the law, but let the conspiracy theories begin!  You can find out about this camera in the news for yourself at: http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-camera-tech-in-darpa-argus-drone-2013-1#ixzz2JLkUtNku.

Questions

I wish I could say that this had been just an ordinary day, but I would have been kidding myself.  I heard one of the most interesting sets of ideas this morning.  This set of ideas belongs to Michael Wesch, a leader in the research field of Social Media.  He made and shared the connection between the word "quest" and "question".  And it's true, to answer a good, solid question, you need to go on a quest.  Questions challenge you on a deep level, and could potentially contradict, re-iterate, or completely annihilate your current standing on any issue.  Unfortunately, The more you learn, the more you want to learn, which in turn leads you to learn more, so you want to learn more etc. So you never finish learning, your quest for answers never finishes, you never find your "Holy Grail" so to speak.  But, it didn't stop King Arthur, and it shouldn't stop you.  But unlike King Arthur, you should be willing to accept the fact that there might not be a Holy Grail, or the Holy Grail is a chair instead.  Don't get too attached to your ideas, it will only make you a dumber person, you may feel smarter, but the reality is you're not.  So ask questions!

Hello world.  Does that seem appropriate in this case?  Regardless, I say hello to you, reader, and wish you a good morning and a good evening tonight.  Speaking of evenings, yesterday I came across an interesting little tidbit of information, it got me thinking, which does not happen much.  It was an article (talk) written by Dallin H. Oaks entitled: "Focus and Priorities".  One thing he mentioned towards the end that made me take a metaphorical step back was when he quoted someone who said that there are three things that can never be recovered:  "Three things never come back- the spent arrow, the spoken word, and the lost opportunity."  I was a boy-scout, so I used to shoot arrows all the time, and I always get them back, but, I think this more refers to Legolas and his seemingly infinite quiver.  The spoken word, once you say something, you can never unsay it, unless you're in Men in Black with that device that wipes people's memories.  That might come close to the same effect.  But lastly, and greatest of them in my opinion, is the lost opportunity.  Unless you have a time machine, you cannot give yourself a second chance to do something you should have already done.  This is not the case with character and behavioral attributes, repentance (if that word confuses you, let me know in the comments so we can discuss it) covers that.  These opportunities are the deeds like saying hello to a stranger that needs it, calling your sister when she is in need of comfort (on a side note, my sister is currently in labor, about to have her son in about an hour), or taking that job in Los Angeles!  The most important of these (because I mentioned my sister) to me are the opportunities with family.  We are not here very long, in fact, in average it's about one hour and forty seven minutes to God.  Half the time of taking a final, and about the same time as a Book of Mormon midterm.  So, to get my point out there, I support Oaks in his saying of spending the time with our family wiser.  My family loves to watch T.V. with each other, but, there are other things such as Scripture Study that we could have put a lot more time into, even going to the park is a better way to get to know your family than watching T.V. So, to you, my readers, if you are just starting a family, take his advice, don't lose the opportunity to have the best relationship with your family you could ever have.  Thank you.