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.