The Modern Tragedy

In the year 1800, our ancestors had to work hard to survive. The middle class citizen had to choose between working and starving. In the United States today, there isn't a stark choice between working and starving. Soup kitchens provide food as long as people can get to them. Often parents provide for their children long past the age at which children can provide for themselves. The modern tragedy is not physical starvation; it is mental starvation. An idle course is the natural course for most people. Laziness used to be inhibited by necessity; now it is a disease that is fed by technology. Technological time-wasters are an easy addiction. People are forgetting how to work and a dearth of work is destroying the human spirit.

Faith: The Unsung Motivating Factor

Time is money; a familiar adage.  This phrase implies that time wasted is money wasted.  It claims that money should be the focus of every person's life.  We are given time, we should translate it into money.  But is everything motivated by money?  In this age of technology, motivation comes from many different sources.  When the public can communicate, events and individuals can motivate others for their cause.  People all over the world are donating their time and resources without the motivation of money, from building the Linux operating system and compiling Wikipedia articles, to providing relief for victims of the tsunami in Japan.  It is easy to believe that people want to do something good and make a difference in the lives of others.  But I think what it comes down to is faith.  Faith in something more vast than we can imagine.

The first entries written for Wikipedia were in answer to a request from Jimmy Wales, the founder.  There was no shared encyclopedia and there was no evidence that Wikipedia was a good idea.  But the people who wrote those entries couldn't have done so just to pass the time.  They had faith that eventually what they wrote would turn into something much bigger than just a few articles.  Linus Torvalds, the chief architect of the Linux kernel, wanted help writing an operating system.  He didn't know that people would help.  He had faith that he could get people to cooperate and help fellow programmers.  When people in other countries are suffering, churches and organizations gather their resources to help.  Many of these organizations's helpers donate their time and even more people give money, food, and clothing.  None of these projects would have succeeded without the faith of the participants.  Money is a motivator, but faith is a major player in the decisions of people across the globe.

A Woman's Perspective

View my video on discrimination at this link:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11499540/discrimination

The Price of Piracy

A song costs 99 cents on iTunes; that doesn't sound very expensive. The iPod Touch 4th Generation can hold 14,000 songs. When it takes $14,000 to fill an iPod, suddenly 99 cents a song sounds a little more pricey. Many people can't afford to buy music, at least not in the quantities they would like to. Everyone can listen to their favorite songs for free with popular sites like Pandora. There are many sites that make piracy an enticing alternative as well. The cost to iTunes for each additional song download is negligible. So why don't we see 10 cents songs? They would still generate a profit. At 10 cents a song, I would be willing to buy lots my favorite songs. It's no surprise that more people pirate songs than buy them when it's infeasible to fill up an iPod at the going rate. The battle against piracy cannot be won in the courtroom. Until songs are legally available at a reasonable price, artists and companies can expect people to go to convenient, free sources for their music.

Detrimental Reverse Discrimination

Reverse discrimination is thought to be the solution for generations of repressed women. This is demeaning and harmful to both men and women. Men are told a woman less qualified than them has more rights than they do. Some women are in positions they can't possibly compete in, all for the sake of equality. When a less-qualified woman is given a position over a more-qualified man, that man is being discriminated against. In addition, the under-qualified woman feels lost, confused, and ultimately inadequate for the position. These feelings of self-doubt are exactly what reverse discrimination is trying to avoid. As a woman in the computer science field, I do not worry about discrimination. I have not faced discrimination. I do worry about those who would overestimate my abilities based on my gender. People who do so are destroying computer science and decimating the morale of computer scientists.

The Big Bang

The Internet has exploded. At it's inception, only government workers knew of it's existence. But since the 1980's, the Internet has experienced exponential growth. A world-wide computer connection system is difficult to fathom, even though it already exists. One of many communities tapping into this resource is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church). The internet is an immeasurable help for the LDS Church's Family History Program.  As the members gather data about their ancestors, records from across the world are available for perusal and individuals are able to find and communicate with relatives in different countries. Despite the evils of the Internet, it is helping to move a good work forward. This powerful tool merely needs to be used constructively.

A Means to An End

What did people do before computers?  For college students, computers are a way of life.  From school work and jobs, to news and entertainment, computers can effect every aspect of life.  Immeasurable on-line resources eliminate the need to leave the house for information or amusement.  Despite this wealth of information, we shouldn't rationalize avoiding other good things in life.  Facebook chatting cannot replace a face-to-face conversation.  Video streaming cannot replace live entertainment.  A computer cannot capture the wonders of real life.  Computers are a tool; they should enhance our lives, not consume them.

The Open Source Solution

Many software developers think that open source software is the best way to quickly create usable code.  While this may be a good idea in some specialized areas of the software world, it does not easily translate into other areas.  Open source development materialized in the dawn of computing when all users were developers.  Users were the intuitive choice for code contributers.  However, much of today's software is used by the computer-savvy developer as well as the computer-illiterate grandmother.  With most popular software, users are more likely to be of the non-developing persuasion.  We wouldn't want our grandparents to get stuck checking their email because they've encountered a bug; or our children to be confused when an educational game doesn't act the way we want it to.  Customers no longer are fellow developers.  Without the fascination and devotion of the public, open source development is becoming obsolete.

The Dawn of Computers

It is odd to think there used to be a world where people trusted others with their computers.  College campuses and science laboratories favored loose security and information accessibility over privacy.  Now computers are protected by passwords, firewalls, and virus detection software.  There is an assumed lack of trust.  It is no longer innocent until proven guilty.  How this change came about is no great mystery.  It is merely a matter of availability.

When Adam and Eve lived on the earth with their first few children there was no need for locks on doors.  They knew and trusted everyone who was capable of breaking in.  The same is true of the dawn of computers.  For a while everyone in the computer business was like a family.  They were all in awe of this new technology and worked together to discover new areas in the field.  The computer geeks all trusted each other with their computer security.

Now the world has grown.  There is more than just one family on earth so people lock their doors.  There is more than one nerdy, trusting group of computer users so people lock up their computers.  As computers become easier to use, they will become more widely hacked.  It's a simple matter of growth.  And the computer industry is nothing without growth.

Driving into Danger

We often see technological advances in movies that seem unrealistic.  A car that drives itself is an example of one of these seemingly implausible concepts that is common in speculation about the future.  But so much could go wrong with a car driving itself:  a bug in the software, or a situation that hasn't been accounted for.  It is hard to imagine people trusting their lives to a computer program every time they step out of the house.  Despite the possible deadly scenarios, the technology for software driven cars is looming in our immediate future. In 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge held a contest for autonomous cars capable of navigating through traffic.  Eleven teams responded.  The technology exists.  Yet there are still two things stopping the autonomous car:  funding, and the trust of the American public.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/07/driving-blind-daytona-thanks-robotic-cars/

The Age of Innovation

In the early 20th century, the radio was cutting edge technology.  Today, the radio is at the risk of extinction, threatened by the many websites that stream music for free.  The outmoding of the radio shows the insufficiency of having a single, new, marketable idea.  To survive in this age of innovation, a company must continuously have new, profitable ideas.  The company then has to market these ideas before someone else does.  The newest ideas may become outdated at any time.  Surviving the changing tides and currents in this technological world is a constant struggle.  Some inventions are footnotes, fads forgotten as quickly as they become popular.  Other inventions are building blocks, quickly reverse engineered and abstracted away into insignificance.  We are truly in the age of innovation.  Those who refuse to change will not survive.


http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/19/internet-radio-fm-pandora-streaming/

A Race Condition

In today's world, people want the newest technology in an expeditious manner, and the first company to provide that service, wins.  Google thrives in this competitive environment; they are today's Microsoft.  They know what the public wants, often when the public doesn't know itself.  Google's new translation technology can translate a spoken sentence into a synthesized voice in a different language.  Translation software has been around for a while, but the people who use these translators know that they're best suited for vocabulary.  When the software has the task of translating meaning or grammar, sentences can come out anywhere from ambiguous to laughable. Getting an spoken, intelligible, foreign response was unthinkable until Google thought of it.  That's what it takes to flourish in the world of computing: coming up with unprecedented ideas and marketing those ideas first.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/01/17/google-translate-app-android-review/

The Lives of Our Children

When considering the technological progress made in the last 20 years, the future seems to be a nebulous blur.  I have often worried about the world in which our children will grow up.  Today, people often spend their free time in front of the TV or on the internet.  No one can fathom how things will change for the next generation.  The enigmatic 'worse' world of 20 years from now is difficult to face at this moment. However, one must consider the reverse of the situation.  When I look at my parents, I feel blessed to have grown up surrounded by technology.  Perhaps instead of fear, the reasonable emotion should be jealousy.