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.