Chatting on the Net

Chatting on the net is something that i have become acostomed to. Whether it be on MSN messenger or posting to the NCT website, I'v had a fair amount experience. I've only ever had bad experiences on some more open chat lines, where random people blow into your conversation and ask you random questions. Its also difficult toi communicate without emotion. So ok, you have emoticons but there usless in displaying sarcasm. Many of my messages are misconstrued either offending people, or giving them the totally wrong idea. Chat rooms and the like should perhaps have an age restriction becoause there is too many creeps lurking. One guy asked me how old i was, and said "I only communicate with people 14 and under". Although chat rooms are a great way of meeting people, and MSN is a great way of keeping in touch with your friends, i think that perhaps when using chat that one is very careful, because you never know who's on the other end...

Final Evaluation

Well, it is the end of the line for me and New Communications Technology. The course content was awsome. I loved learning the origins of the net and the computer, and the way the concepts and theories made me think about the society we live in today. Introducing ideas like "Utopia" and "Dystopia" was also an interesting experience. Musing as to whether our future is going to be destroyed by half man, half computer cyborgs, or that the future may hold a fairytale where computers and human kind live in harmony, was really fun. The only problems I personally had was that i found it difficult to keep up with the readings. This is perhaps because of work related issues but that is regardless, and university should have been my main priority. A problem for myself and a few other friends in the course was the learning of the "photoshop" program. Luckily I had prior experience to the program but a friend of mine had no idea. I felt that perhaps a little more attention in the tutorials could have been made on emphasising that everyone knew how to use the program. The test was really good, and I felt there was a good range of questions. Overall the program was fun, insightive, intersting and i will certainly be recommending the course to first year students as an excellent starting point. Thanks for a great semester, regards, Lyle.

Beautiful, airbrushed photoshop-edited pictures

The top photo is of university life.... It is so hard to park WELL for FREE at uni... This day I nailed this park... And obviously there is some excellent coming attractions to the uni bar aswell...

The photo below is of my friend called "Summer". huh? huh? Thinking outside of the square hey?! I just used the marquee tool to cut her out and then shaded the edges to make her blend!

Excel... hardest exercise ever

I remember doing a lot of excel tasks for grade 10 math, however the version and my memory eluded me for this task. It was rather easy to do the first 2 parts of this exercise, due to the fact that the instructions were once again easy to follow… Until I discovered the Macro’s part. I couldn’t find the “hide” button when I right clicked on row four… I do have a fairly recent version of Excel so perhaps that was my pitfall. I did try to trudge on but without instruction Macro’s is a hard thing to get a hang of and unfortunately, the first two parts of this task is as far as I got.

Power.... Point

I was already pretty savvy with PowerPoint, having done many presentations throughout high school and the beginning of my university career. I had absolutely no problems and found the exercise a little boring. Once again the instructions were easy to follow and very self explanatory, however, as I stated before, I am quite the PowerPoint Fiend.

WORD: No woes

I just completed the exercises for the MS word tutorial, and I think that it is perhaps the most useful task we have done yet… along with Photoshop, Knowing and using these programs is awesome. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. There was only one problem, and this occurred when writing recipients in the merge mail list. “Job Title” was not a selectable option, so I clicked “add” and added the “Job Title” Field. Yay me!

New Comm Tech Troubles...

It is 3:30 am on saturday morning and here I am, Just finshed work and I'm a tired wreck. My essay is very indicative of my lifestyle.... trying to fit 50 hours in at work and studying full time... somethings gotta give. I'm also finding that to stay on top of the readings requires many many hours, and this is also quite difficult... They are however all very intersting articles, so reading them isn't a huge chore, but finding the time is insane. I guess I'll be cramming hardcore come exam time.

NCT essay....

Technology and Our Future: Help or Hindrance?

Picture this: 2010: Computers become invisible. 2020: $1000 buys a computer working at 10 quadrillion, or 1016 calculations per second. 2025: Computers are able to simulate the entire human brain. 2030: Non-biological intelligence matches human intelligence in range and subtlety; $1000 buys a computer 1000 times more powerful than the human brain. 2045: The point of “singularity” is reached, when technology progress is so fast that human intelligence can’t follow it. One can no longer distinguish between our biology and our technology. 22nd Century: Our intelligence, biological and non-biological combined, saturates the matter and energy around us and begins to spread throughout the universe (Anthes, Gary H. 2006 p28)

This is what Ray Kurzweil – inventor / writer / futurist, predicts for our future. He also predicts that by 2045, human intelligence and computer intelligence will fuse and become indistinguishable (Anthes, Gary H. 2006 p28). These issues ar raised time and again by many authors, some journal articles , some books. Some of the key issues one such book presents is: This Virtual Life: Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World. Some of the key questions raised are:
Will the future be utopia or dystopia – a dream leisure society or a technological madhouse?
Can humans cope with so much artificiality in their lives, or will they become maladjusted, aggressive, simulation sick and unable to communicate with one and other in the real world.
Will we be able to dominate our new technology or will it dominate us?
Will our lives continue to be flooded by a ritualised escapist entertainment activities sold to us by huge multinationals to assuage our supposed dissatisfaction with life, or will we increasingly return to nature for a more real view of our world.
(A. Evans, 2001, p3)

A dream leisure society may be difficult to define. However, certain medical breakthroughs and other huge advances in the medical field may make living in society a lot dreamier… especially for those that are sick! If Kurzweil’s prediction of putting nanobots into the bloodstream by the late 2020’s is correct, then perhaps a dreamier tomorrow is not to far off. Kurzweil mused that these nanobots may be able to repair tissue, or carry out lifesaving operations - all from inside you!. World Health (http://www.worldhealth.net/p/413,1211.html), a website devoted to bringing medical news to the world, has some very interesting articles, stating that prototyping and development in these area’s are already beginning. Perhaps even as early as next year prototypes may be ready for testing. Similar research in the medical field is also being carried out on Virtual Reality.

A Utah University is developing Virtual reality prototypes right now. (http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/) And not just for the aid of medicine. Virtual reality is helpful for predicting outcomes of things such as natural disasters without them actually occurring. Computer Aided Design (CAD) architectural software and earthquake simulations are all helping the development of building structure to prevent building collapses in the future. VR has reached the point where an operator can have real-time interaction with a virtual world simulation of a real scene (N. M. & D. Thalmann, 1993 p1) This is of course only a small facet of how virtual reality may help society. To see some of the worlds leading designers of Virtual Reality, visit the Sweedish VR site. (http://vrlab.epfl.ch/) They’re continually preparing experiments and dealing with VR related issues. There is however, a dark side to our technological future. An interesting insight into what the future may hold is on the ABC website, check it out. http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/indepth/s1349333.htm

This technological madhouse theory of Andrew Evans is very possible. Humanity may slowly fade out of existence. With nanobots flowing through the bloodstream, it may be possible for them to lodge into our brains and start controlling us. Already we are using robots for medical aid… and once again, if Kurzweil’s predictions that computer’s will be able to improve themselves, there’s no telling how smart they might become. Smarter than humans… this is the premise the movie I, Robot formulates on. OK, fantasy… but how far off is this fantasy from becoming reality? It starts the mind thinking about this dystopia.

Discussing the plot of science fiction movies, Arthur C. Clarke said, “We do this not to predict the future, but to prevent it” (A. Evans, 2001, p148). Movies aren’t all fun and games. They deal with real issues, and perhaps to scare people into believing that these things are very possible. Movies help us to formulate (usually) the worst-case scenario, especially when discussing Artificial intelligence and Virtual Reality. The movie Exsitenz is based on the premise that one can play virtual reality games, indeed have whole lives made up in a virtual world, by plugging into a bio-port. The end of the movie is brilliant, where the audience isn’t sure if it is real or not…

Movies such as Existenz and the matrix, using biological technology to transport the body to other dimensions, whether they be gaming or a complete new world. The future of technology may not be far off from that. The same premise is used in both of these movies… will it come to the point where it is impossible to distinguish between the real and the virtual. Are you actually reading this yourself or did you fall accidentally through a virtual wormhole, without realizing it, and are now having an out of body experience… Is this real?

If you’re still confused, visit wikepedia, and the have the “idiots guide” to VR. Quite an interesting read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality

References:
1. Germann, C., Broida, J. K., & Broida J. M. (2003). Using Computer-Based Virtual Tours to Assist Persons With Disabilities. Educational Technology & Society, 6(3), 53-60,
2. Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld 40.2 (Jan 9, 2006): p28(2).
3. Thalmann, Nadia M. & Daniel (ed) (1993) Virtual Worlds and Multimedia Wiley New York

4. Morse, Margaret (1998) Virtualities Indiana University Press Indiana

5. Evans, Andrew (2001) This Virtual Life Fusion Press London

How long is a piece of string? (ie: The inner workings of the search engine)

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites.

Building the IndexOnce the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages (and we should note that this is a task that is never actually completed -- the constantly changing nature of the Web means that the spiders are always crawling), the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:
The information stored with the data
The method by which the information is indexed
In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.
To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.
Regardless of the precise combination of additional pieces of information stored by a search engine, the data will be encoded to save storage space. For example, the original Google paper describes using 2 bytes, of 8 bits each, to store information on weighting -- whether the word was capitalized, its font size, position, and other information to help in ranking the hit. Each factor might take up 2 or 3 bits within the 2-byte grouping (8 bits = 1 byte). As a result, a great deal of information can be stored in a very compact form. After the information is compacted, it's ready for indexing.
An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word. The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.
In English, there are some letters that begin many words, while others begin fewer. You'll find, for example, that the "M" section of the dictionary is much thicker than the "X" section. This inequity means that finding a word beginning with a very "popular" letter could take much longer than finding a word that begins with a less popular one. Hashing evens out the difference, and reduces the average time it takes to find an entry. It also separates the index from the actual entry. The hash table contains the hashed number along with a pointer to the actual data, which can be sorted in whichever way allows it to be stored most efficiently. The combination of efficient indexing and effective storage makes it possible to get results quickly, even when the user creates a complicated search. What are my favourite SE? (http://computer.howstuffworks.com/search-engine2.htm accessed May 18th 2006)

(Note: It was incredible difficult to summarize this whole process so i used the website "How stuff works". It is incredibly helpful.

Some of the lates search engine news is:

Google is looking at criminal investigation by Brazil because the country claims that it is circulating child pornography. Also, a new york times internet writer was jailed by China. There are many other journalists and writers up for charges admist a crack down on the tightening up of controls and media and freedom of speech. (http://www.topix.net/business/search-engines accessed 18th May 2006)

Posting activities

I love reading the forums and now love writing in them. But it was a dark and lonely road to posting savvy-ness. I got really excited in week 1 or 2 and jumped straight into posting... Big mistake. Naive, I wandered into a zone of opinions and judgment and was absolutely destroyed by a fellow poster-er. This was fine, because it made me more conscious of what I was actually writing... And then I had an epiphany. I started to provoke with what I said. Subtle little things that I hope people will post about. Perhaps in the near future I'll post something incredibly controversial and see what kind of response they can conjure up. hahahahaha! I'm so evil! So post on fellow posters. Live long and post away!

Alphaville review

Adam was right, "Alphaville is not the matrix". Indeed, far from it. Of course only in a film savvy context. The whole concept of a computer controlling a city is amazing considering that the film was produced in 1964. It is a great concept even for today, yet the acting/cinematics are very 1960's. There is perhaps a resonance between Goddards view of the future and us today. Probably not as elaborate but we are more or less run by computers. Just one example of us relying on computers is university life and in particular, this course. Without it I couldnt post to the forums and therefore, probably fail. However its not just students who rely on/cant live without computers. It is also business people the world over. Stock exchange, up to the minute market updates, databases, all rely on computers and technology to exist. So our emotions, feelings and soul are our own, but in one way or another, we all rely on computers and technolgy to live... (comfortably anyway). So Goddard didnt miss the mark by much... And how long before we do rely on computers to tell us how to feel? When to laugh or to cry? When to love or hate?

Scavenger hunt

1. What is the weight of the world's biggest pumpkin? I asked "Jeeves" and his answer was: Another record for the world's largest pumpkin. Oregon farmer STEVE DOLETAS grew a pumpkin that weighed 1,180 pounds. Mooter.com offered me no help at all. Seeing 'relevance' is their moto...
2. What is the best way (quickest, most reliable) to contact Grant Hackett? Miami Olympic heated pool, 80 pacific ave, Miami, qld, 4220. I looked into Altavista.com and another blog from this course in the past came up. Sorry Lenny_G. Actually, I'll reference it : Lenny_G (http://www.users.on.net/~lenus/nct/2005/04/nct-week-6.html) accessed 21/3/06
3. What is the length of a giraffe's tongue? A giraffe's tongue is 18 to 20 inches (46 to 50 centimeters) long and blue-black. Thankyou a9.com http://a9.com/length%20of%20giraffes%20tongue
4. How would you define the word "ontology"? What does it really mean? An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. In philosophy it refers to the subject of existence. Basically : Knowing about knowing... ujiko.com was little help but we got there in the end. http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html
5. What was David Cronenberg's first feature film? Shivers... *ba ba boow* (scary horror music) Icerocket.com. cool name. coll search engine. http://horrorlibrary.net/MovieRJC100104.htm
6. When was the original "Hacker's Manifesto" written? originally written in 1989. hotbot.com isn't useless http://www.hotbot.com/default.asp?query=hackers+manifesto+originally+written&ps=&loc=searchbox&tab=web&provKey=Ask+Jeeves 7. Why do all phone numbers in Hollywood films start with "555"? They do it on purpose so that no-one can molest the unsuspecting owner of a number - 555-numbers do not exist. a9.com once again. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A812800#footnote5 (this page is very funny)
8. What is the cheapest form of travel from Crete to Rhodes? To walk and swim. or fly by yourself (check out my blog)... I didn't need a search engine for that one.
9. What song was top of the Australian Pop Charts this week in 1965? Over The Rainbow Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs. http://www.onmc.iinet.net.au/top/1965.htm
10. Which Brisbane band was (still is?) Stephen Stockwell a member of? Brisbane punk band Black Assassins http://www.brisbanewritersfestival.com.au/2005/content/standard.asp?name=StockwellS

Mailing Lists

The association of Internet researches:www.aoir.org/ "The Association of Internet Researchers is an academic association dedicated to the advancement of the cross-disciplinary field of Internet studies. It is a member-based support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research independent from traditional disciplines and existing across academic borders. The association is international in scope."(The association of Internet researcheswww.aoir.org/ accessed 16/3/2006) With over 1000 subscribers AOIR organsie an annual Internet Research conference, and also publish the Internet Research Annual. Their submissions from users are sometimes very general and of topics that aren't as relevant to my essay.

Institute for new media studies: www.inms.umn.edu/ "The University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies is a center for creation, innovation, and examination of content and messages and the affects of new media technologies and techniques on their forms and functions.
The goal is the imagining and testing of innovative forms, development of new knowledge about functions, and generation of greater understanding of the impacts of these changes in the media landscape."('Institute for new media studies' www.inms.umn.edu/ accessed 16/3/2006) Subscribers to this mailing list are offered a variety of research and information. Just one example is the GRAVEL (Game Research And Virtual Environment Plan) project. GRAVEL looks at exploring the structure of game and virtual reality environments. They do this to advance research and better understand the cultural, communicative, aesthetic, technical, and social implications and opportunities these structures provide. This particular mailing list is great for me because the focus of my essay will be Internet video games and their effect on society.

Spammy McSpamster: My SPam Dilema

I got busted by AOL when I first signed up with them a year ago. I was setting up my email account and sent myself 500 test emails by accident. They shut me down instantly. Woops! So I rang up the customer helpline and got it sorted out, and an hour after being accused of being a spam mastermind, everything was back to normal. It was interesting to note a particular article in the reader about junk email and spam laws. Authentication seems to be the way of the future. In terms of new spamming laws, check out www.caube.org.au/. Apparently as of the 10th of April 2004 it was "...illegal to send even one unsolicited commercial email..."(Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk Email www.caube.org.au/ accessed 16/3/2006). However even after said date, I have been receiving more spam e-mail than I know what to do with. Hotmail accounts are particularly vulnerable (only from personal expierience) to unsolicited emails. So much so that I rarely ever check mine because I'm sick of seeing "Make your 'manly bit' larger... All natural!". Hotmail and other email accounts that are bombarded with spam, in my opinion, will probably be abandoned unless something is done to minimise the amount of 'junk' we receive. But, i'm getting off the soap box now 'cause I gotta go to work. Fare thee well