Comments on: Terry Furey's Lectures

I thought Mr. Furey's talk on the uses and implications of genotyping and mapping the human genome was very interesting. From his lectures, I learned about the various businesses that you can pay to genotype you to say your probability of contracting certain diseases or conditions. However, right now it seems that tracing your family's history is a more effective (and much cheaper) way to determine your susceptibility to diseases. One thing I found particularly interesting was the issue of who owns your DNA. I cannot believe that some companies are actually patenting part of my DNA sequence. According to Wikitionary, a patent is a "declaration issued by a government agency declaring someone the inventor of a new invention and having the privilege of stopping others from making, using or selling the claimed invention." Under this definition, its very hard to believe that governments actually let people patent our DNA. These people did not "invent" the DNA in are bodies, it is natural. They were just the first people to try to claim rights to it. The idea of patenting DNA and holding sole rights to "its use" is like the idea of patenting an eagle and holding sole rights to how people may want to use an eagle. It is a part of nature, not some man-made object. Now, I could understand if they wanted to patent a way to read a DNA sequence or a medicine meant to help a condition caused by a DNA sequence, because a company could invent those solutions. But the idea of a company having the sole rights to anything done with a certain DNA strand is preposterous--the company doesn't own it, it is in the "public domain" of nature, and every individual has their own copy.

Another interesting issue was about what rights people have to be protected from discrimination based on DNA. One law, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, makes it illegal for insurance companies to deny insurance based on genetics, and employers to deny employment based on genetics. However, going in to the future, is this really something we can enforce? For one, companies could simply say they are firing you because of another reason, when in reality it is because of your DNA. Also, eventually it could become very easy and fast to read and genotype DNA, and companies could secretly test you to determine if they want to hire you or fire you. Its next to impossible to hide your DNA. People lose hair and skin cells naturally every day. All a company would have to do is find a stray hair or bodily fluid and then they could see exactly what your strengths and weaknesses are, as dictated by your DNA. Another issue around this is the question of is hiring on the basis of genes actually bad? Really, your DNA is just a bodily resume of your strengths and weaknesses as a human, and companies choose on the basis of resumes, and strengths and weaknesses, all the time. Companies are always looking to hire the best person for the job. Wouldn't a paper resume and DNA test be the best determiner of how affect you could be at your job? Also, should people who apply for jobs that could be dangerous to people with certain genetic conditions have to be tested for those genetic conditions? Not only would these people be ineffective at their job, but they may get very hurt by doing it. For example, should construction workers be tested for genetic signs that would say how likely they are to have a heart attack under physical stress? Yes, DNA testing as part of a job application seems like an invasion of privacy, but don't we, as determined individuals, want the best for our companies so we can provide the best products and services? And don't we want to make sure no one could put themselves in harms way by doing a certain job? DNA testing would allow us to make sure we are hiring healthy and effective people, just as the required resume, physical examination, and health disclosure forms do in today's workplace.

SL Commercial Enterprise: 777 League

777 League (http://slurl.com/secondlife/2raw/117/92/22) - This island contains a community for virtual racing that includes one of the longest, most elaborate racing tracks in Second Life. They also have tons of really cool looking cars you can view in the showroom. This business allows you to look at the cars in the showroom and watch races for free, but in order to participate, you must pay $10 to buy a car, and a small fee to partake in a race. The company also comes out with new "updated" models of many cars over time, so people are inclined to keep purchasing the newer cars because they might look cooler or have better stats. The island also has a club for racers to hangout in, and a biker club for bike racers. The clubs are free to enter and free to attend events.

The target customer of this business is people who enjoy watching races, car-afficianatos, and people who enjoy racing video games, because this business revolves around creating a pay-to-play version of "Need for Speed" or other racing games in Second Life. Racing games are very popular on computer and video game consoles, so they will probably also be popular on Second Life. Also, because this island has one of the longest, most elaborate racing tracks in Second Life, as well as many live performances at its clubs, it is a unique combination of large scale racing, lounging, socializing, and dancing. The live performances attract people to the island, and while there, they see all the racing stuff the 777 club has to offer which makes them want to buy a car and race too.

Comments on Smith and Jenkins Lectures:

After hearing what Mr. Smith and Ms. Jenkins have to say about intellectual property and copyright law, I have come to the conclusion that copyright laws are so strict toward protecting the rights of current intellectual property owners that digital creativity is being stifled in the rest of us. Because IP owners have so much control over where their content is used, copied, and extended upon, most people are afraid to be creative for the fear that they will infringe on content someone has already copyrighted. Because so many ideas are copyrighted, it is hard to create unless you want to work from complete scratch on something, or want to track down whether what you want to extend is in the public domain, and if it is not, track down who owns it and ask permission. Both of these directions can be a long and arduous process, so many people choose simply to not even attempt to create because they don't want to deal with these complexities. Also, people who aren't aware of these complications and do create something that includes someone else's copyrighted content either get sued or have their content destroyed if the person who copyrighted it didn't approve it. This sadness someone feels after something they worked on for such a long time is destroyed is more than enough to deter the person from ever trying to create something unique again.

This is evident in the movie "Be Kind Rewind," where people create parodies of popular movies without permission, and end up having countless hours of work completely and utterly destroyed. I have also had this happen to me, personally. My senior year in high school, I decided to create a highlight tape for my high school wrestling team. I video taped it, edited it, and put it together myself. Then, to top it off, I put it to music -- specifically the song "Click, click, boom" by Saliva. Proud of my work, I posted it on Facebook. A week later, I received an email from Facebook saying they had removed my content because it infringed on copyrighted material -- the music was copyrighted. I was very distraught that after all my hard work, I couldn't show it to my friends and family.

However, I didn't give up. I posted my video on Youtube. Youtube has made a deal with iTunes to handle copyrighted content a different way. My video is allowed to remain on Youtube as long as there is an advertisement in the video to buy the copyrighted music I used. While I was able to publish my video, it was still frustrating that I pretty much didn't have any rights over the property I created to choose whether the ad displays or not. Even though the music is someone else's, I created all the video on my own, and it is my creative property. But in order to show it to the world, I had to give up my rights to it because someone had already copyrighted the music. This was especially annoying because there ws no goal to make money off this, I was simply a harmless high-schooler who wanted to show what I had made to the world. Because of how frustrating the whole process of publishing my work was, I am now much more hesitant to begin any more creative projects for fear that I will lose my rights over them, or they will not be viewable at all because they partly infringe on someone else's copyright. The video is viewable here, the ad can be scene 10 seconds in.

Comments on: Don Fowler lecture and TWIT

I found Don Fowler's lecture to be very interesting. While I had heard of the job title "IT consultant" before, I was always unaware of what that really meant. Mr. Fowler did a great job of showing us what it is IT consultants do--they are hired by a various clients to help make certain aspects of the businesses of their clients run more efficiently and effectively through the use of information technology. One thing I found interesting through Mr. Fowler's presentation was the fact that this is a job that has directly been created by the dawn of the age of computers. Without computer technology, this type of job could not exist, and none of the solutions IT consultants devise for their clients would be possible to employ. For example, Fowler's solution to the case study he used in class was to outsource his business to areas where labor is cheaper. Without computers, and especially without the internet, it would not be possible to spread out different aspects of a business over different continents, because communication and transfer of information between each of the beacons in different geographical areas would be impossible.

I also found it very interesting that, as Mr. Fowler noted, the IT Consulting industry has business in times of economic boom and economic recession. In an economic boom, businesses look to IT consultants to help them expand their business. In times of recession, businesses look to IT consultants to help them make their businesses more cost effective. In this way, the job of an IT consultant is stable because he still has a lot of work in times of economic turmoil. On the other hand, because an IT consultant works from project to project, he doesn't have a steady employment. Instead of constantly being assigned tasks by a boss, an IT consultant has to advertise to different businesses to pick him to do their consults rather than another IT consultant. In this way, an IT consultant could find himself in work one second, and completely out of work in the next. There is no in between.

I thought the topic in This Week In Tech about how technology is changing the world of newspaper publishing very interesting. This Week In Tech says that as more people gain the ability to access the internet, they are using the internet to receive there news online, both because it is faster to find what you want to read and because it is (in many cases) free. I agree that the rise of the Internet will continue to lead to the downfall of print news sources. For one, as older people who don't know much about the Internet die and tech-savvy youngsters take their place, less and less people will look to print sources to get their news. Also, with the rise of blogs and sites like Wikipedia, people are working for free to publish news on every topic imaginable. How can an industry that has to pay its writers to write news topics every keep up? What makes this worse, as TWIT notes, is that online advertisements make much less money per advertisement than do print advertisements. This means that even if these news sources do make the transition from print to the Internet, they won't get as much revenue from advertisements, yet there writers will still want the same salary. On top of that, these websites won't be able to charge the user a fee to read the online newspaper because there are tons of sources of news on the internet that are completely free, and users will just use these if a site requires them to pay. Lastly, many people, myself included, just don't like the organization of a print newspaper. You have to turn and fold countless pages to read the story you want, and then do it again when you turn to another page to read the second half of the article. This doesn't happen with internet news sources. There's nothing to physically handle or sort through, you just click on an article and read it. for these reasons, people are switching from reading the hard-to-read newspapers to reading online sources of news.

Reflections on the DiVE and Recent Lectures

Coming into class today, I was skeptical of how useful immersive virtual environments could really be. After seeing the Dive in action today, however, I am very confident that immersive virtual environments have many applicable uses. For one, the Dive, as well as other immersive virtual environments, create a level of realism that is unparalleled by other virtualization software. Instead of watching an avatar interact with a virtual world in 2D, as you do with simple virtual environments, projects like the Dive allow the user to actually BE the avatar--to walk through a 3-D computer generated world in a way that is extremely realistic, and to interact with virtual object as if they were right in front of you in real life.

Because these projects have such a phenomenal, unmatched level of realism, they could be used in the future for many of the same projects as virtual environments are used for today. However, by using these highly immersive environments rather than basic virtual environments, the effects of the project using the immersive virtual environment would be much more pronounced. For example, a project designed to teach kids about chemistry using virtual environments could really benefit from an environment like those created by the Dive. With a regular virtual environment, yes children could view molecules and use a mouse to interact with their parts, and yes they would learn something by doing this. However, if you used an immersive virtual environment to do the same project, the kids would learn much more because instead of simply viewing molecules, they could journey inside and around them in three dimensions, as well as interact with their parts in full range of motion rather than the 4 directions a mouse allows.

One shortcoming I did notice with the Dive was that you couldn't walk very far in it without hitting a wall. To combat this, there was a joystick to move yourself forward in the environment. This solved the problem of moving large virtual distances in a confined physical space, but it did seem to be the only element detracting from realism. I think one way to fix this might be to make the floor a mechanical structure like a treadmill. That way, the user could move forward all they like, and the treadmill would constantly make sure they stay in the center. This would give the user the sensation of physically moving through a virtual environment, without all the pain of running into a wall.

Prof. Schwartz-Bloom Lecture Response

While I don't think you always need more than one representation of data to get your point across, I think providing more than one way of looking at data can never hurt, and could be very helpful to people who didn't understand the first representation. The more representations of the same data you have, the deeper you 'drill' the information into the heads of the people looking at your representations. However, when you are representing something of common knowledge, you don't need to represent the data in multiple ways, becuase the viewer will already understand what you are representing. In other words, the more abstract the idea, the more ways you should depict your data. For example, this picture depicts red blood cells of a human. If the audience is already familiar enough with what blood looks like, then this representation is enough to re-introduce them to the idea. However, if the audience isn't familiar with how blood looks (like maybe young children who haven't taken any biology), you should provide more depictions of the data to help drive your point across. For example, showing this image, as well as the first one, will help show uninformed viewers what blood really looks like through the similarities between the two pictures. As they say in English class, when trying to get information across, "say what your going to say, then say it, then say it again". This principle applies to all representation of information, not just writing.

While I do consider myself a visual thinker, I still remember one mnemonic device from high school that my teacher taught us to help us remember which words are associated with 'essere' in the past participle form of the Italian language. Each letter in the mnemonic device "SUPERMANDAVE" stands for a certain Italian word that starts with that letter. Whenever I would need to use the past participle on a test, I would recall SUPERMANDAVE to help me remember how to correctly form the past participle.

Richardson's Lecture vs Storm Visualization Video

The Severe storm visualization seemed to have the purpose only to show the uneducated (about storms) viewer a storm system in a way that they could comprehend. This is different from the molecular visualizations made by Jane Richardson, which presented the information in a way so that the educated (about molecules) viewer could quickly understand what the characteristics of the molecule he/she was looking at are, and then use it as data for other purposes, or even modify it to make it a more accurate representation of the molecule it is representing.

While the earlier storm visualization was successful in helping the viewer understand how a storm works and looks, that was all it could do. Nowadays, visualizations, like the molecule visualizations shown by Richardson, can be open source and easily modifiable to portray whatever data the user gives it. They also act as system to portray data you are working on. Richardson demonstrated this when she corrected, in real-time, a molecule that had certain proteins incorrectly positioned. She saw some proteins were incorrectly positioned through a visualization system, and then used that same visualization system to fix the molecule.

The storm visualization did have some problems that detracted from its ability to demonstrate storms to the viewer. For example, the rainbow spectrum the reflectivity was mapped to is not perceived by our eyes, in term of realizing linear change, as well as white to black, or white to red color maps. Also, the scale on the visualization was misleading--the height of the storm had by enhanced so that it didn't fit the units of the grid in the usual way. And the storm visualization used high contrast on things less important in the image, rather than only saving the high contrast for things that were very important the user focus on. In the screen shots or the remade version, these things were corrected. As a result, the information about the storm being visualized was much easier to perceive and comprehend.