CIS2 Group Projects - Fall 2015 - Group A

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Individual Lists

Nicholas Reed - http://wikieducator.org/User:NicholasReed
Joe Neto - http://wikieducator.org/User:Jnetojr
Ken Miyajima - http://wikieducator.org/User:KenMiyajima
Nicholas Rowland - http://wikieducator.org/User:Nickjrowland
Kavya Rajagopala - http://wikieducator.org/User:Rkav6
Lizeth Tapia - http://wikieducator.org/User:Liztapia01


Group A "Best" resources


1. Introductions

Written by Ken Miyajima

Our group felt it was really important to learn the history of computers and other developments of technologies to start observing computers and society. And this webpage does a great job of presenting you a well-formatted timeline of computers’ history you may never heard of before. This interesting information will help you to build a fundamental knowledge about the relationship between computers and our society, since the relationship started very early. Other small details about criminal action and judicial reaction are also included and especially important today. We found it very interesting and thought it would be helpful for anyone who is vaguely interested in technology to read this article in order to boost understanding and knowledge.

This article introduces the total of twenty rules for digital citizenship to make us aware of how we should act on the Internet. It is really important for anyone to understand what we “DO” and “DON’T” on the Internet to avoid any problems and have a safe, positive, and courteous time while using the Internet. One of the rules introduced in this article is “Be Wary of Your Footprint,” and this is a really good example of what we should do when we use the Internet. Today, most people like to use social media services such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and they readily enjoy sharing their lifestyles with others, even strangers. These posts sometimes cause serious issues, so it is really significant to know what you post on the Internet cannot be removed and changed and has potentials to trigger off serious problems. Therefore, reading this artifice will give you how to use the Internet properly. This along with the other rules we felt that many people on the internet could do with reading, and as such have included it.


2. Privacy and Freedom of Speech

Written by Nicholas Reed

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was chosen due to their strong connection to both protecting your privacy and all free speech on the internet. The organization has been fighting for digital rights of all types since 1990 and has more recently played large roles in the NSA domestic spying revelations, the FCC verdict on net neutrality, and all of the SOPA, CISPA, and related bills. They are currently involved in legal action on many fronts which can be seen here (https://www.eff.org/cases). It was felt that with their comparatively enormous role in so many pro consumer, citizen, and society areas and movements that the EFF deserved to be on our list.

This article by The Intercept is included for its very in depth explanation of the NSA's XKEYSCORE program as well as its abuses and consequences. The program is designed to carry out the mass collection of data from the internet and networks it has access to on a global scale, including (despite supposed rules to the otherwise) data from American companies and consumers. The article speaks at length about how privacy and the 4th Amendment are involved with this, part of which is the lack of proper oversights and the great potential for abuses by both analysts and people that are not supposed to be using the system. The article is also great for including all of the XKEYSCORE documents that are referenced in it. The group felt that considering the importance of the issue in relation to privacy and the depth of the issue that this article should be included on this list.


3. Intellectual Property

Written by Nicholas Reed

This guide to basic copyright is not without its issues, but still provides great introductory information about copyright. To get the issue out of the way, it is titled as a guide for students, but students are only mentioned at the beginning and end of the page, not a big issue at all. The actual contents of the article we found to be a great basic intro to copyright. It also includes videos for certain portions, making some of the more complex parts easier to understand. We thought that the best covered part was the portion on the time that copyright is held since it includes both the basic time the original copyright is held for but also mentions things like hairs and public domain. The group thinks that one would be hard pressed to find a better beginning resource for copyright.

Creative Commons is a free open source copyright system that anyone can use for their work. It offers various levels of control to the creator regarding what and how their works are able to be used through a variety of different levels of licenses. These different licenses are well explained on their website and there is even a page that helps you pick the license and fill it out (https://creativecommons.org/choose/). Creative is a non-profit organization and survives on small donations despite being used by enormous websites and popular groups such as Wikipedia, Google, and Nine Inch Nails. Creative Commons was chosen by the group for these reasons and we think that it will continue to grow in the future.


4. Crime

Written by Joe Neto Jr.

With the growth of technology, children of all ages now have access to the Internet through many various avenues. Whether a child is texting a group of friends with their mobile devices or participating in social media interaction, cyberbullying is an issue that is growing more prevalent with technological advancements that brings more digital connections into our homes. This website is a great resource for parents, teachers, and children to help identify cyberbullying, preventative actions that should be taken to limit threats of cyberbullying, and the steps that should be taken when there is a need to report cyberbullying. The difference between bullying and cyberbullying is that cyberbullying can happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Where children use to have an escape at home from school bullying, now digital access allows the bullying to continue into the home by way of social media and text messaging. The effects of cyberbullying could be detrimental to a child, teen, or even adults, often leading to early alcohol and drug use, skipping school, poor grades, lower self-esteem, and even increased health problems. Just as you would expect parents to know where their child is hanging out and whom they are hanging out with, the same principle should be applied to a child’s Internet usage. There is no denying that the internet is going to become more and more of our everyday lives, it is important to keep it safe for everybody. And while it is critical to teach our children not only the importance of identifying cyberbullying, it is just as important to make sure our kids are not becoming the bullies themselves. In addition, cyberbullying can be worse than more traditional bullying, because when on the internet attacking or yelling at someone can feel impersonal, so there is little empathy involved. Our group chose this article and topic because we feel it's an important issue on the interent that more people should take an interest in or active role preventing.  

At the heart of this article is the realization that, with our growing reliance on a digital infrastructure, we should have a backup plan that relies on analog devices and human intuition. This article discusses the Navy’s decision to revert back to teaching navigation by the way of the stars, as sailing was done in it’s most primitive times. The importance of educating ship navigation officers in this long lost art of sailing lies within the ability to navigate should all radars and GPS tracking go dark. Whether under a technological attack or just digital system shutdown, it is important for our military, and to go even further, society as a whole, to have a backup plan initiated should our digital infrastructure ever go dark. Imagine not being able to take funds out of the bank, not having electricity, or water due to a breech in the system servers or a complete digital meltdown. With our current war on terrorism, it is especially important to have a secondary, human-type approach, to running our national, state, and municipal infrastructures, so that should we ever be attacked by way of a technological insurgence, we are prepared to cope and move on with a sustainable way of life. This article was selected by our group because we feel that having a backup plan to a digital based workflow or infrastructure is imperative to keep order in the case of an emergency.


5. Employment, Education and Entertainment

Written by Joe Neto Jr.

This article examines the challenges schools and universities will face in the future, unless they change the way they operate. One of the topics within this article was the explanation of the "full-stack model," which is essentially a way for schools to pull elements of being the employer, a lender, a school and a recruiter, in order to make their students more successful. Some graduate schools already adhere by this methodology by offering industry leading instructors and the highest standard of curriculum in the field, providing Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAP) that come directly from the school at no interest, and clinical programs that provide work experience and professional connections that often lead to employment. It’s important to make learning more than just the issuing of a degree of accomplishment, but to assist students at all junctions of the process. In turn, this will create an institution that is successful in recruiting and turning out more students that are ready to join the workforce, contribute to society, and not having to be anchored down by loan debt. As a group we decided that the full-stack model would benefit the students, the workforce, and the school, and therefore should be adopted by higher education institutions.

Business leaders and politicians worry that a lack of qualified workers, in the sciences and engineering fields, will cause the U.S. to lose ground to other advanced nations. This article discusses the potential and positive outcomes of STEM programs and how they reinforce the engineering and design process that is critical in order to regenerate a new generation of engineers and scientists. Where these disciplines were mostly focused on during high school years and higher education courses, it is now being considered and introduced into more elementary and middle school grades, in order to produce interest at an earlier age. The advancement of technology and the state of the ecology of earth provides a hot bed for study. If we don’t start to consider that a shortage of qualified workers in the science and engineering sectors could leave us living in a digital stone-age, or we could find that all our natural resources are extinguished, we could be left dependent on foreign countries to provide us with these resources. Some may argue that the grades K-8 are too soon to implement the study of these disciplines, but as the article states, “Public education needs STEM to remain relevant.” Our group chose this article on teaching STEM courses in the lower grades of K-8th grade, because there is a dire need for a resurgence of scientists and engineers in the U.S. Our group thinks that if we are to compete and accomplish goals with other countries, we need to have the fresh young minds developed in these areas for future years.


6. Midterm - Grand Challenges

Written by Nicholas Rowland

Solar energy is rapidly becoming one of the most common form of green energy available to the public. Relying on photo-sensitive cells, photons of light are converted into electricity that can power our lives. Solar Energy World is a Maryland based company solely devoted to installing solar panels on top of any building with a roof. What also adds to the incentive besides free power, the cost of investment is over 100% within the first 5 years, doubling savings every additional 5 years. This explosion of solar energy has led them to being in the top ten of rooftop installations in all of North America. Businesses like this are why our group felt it necessary to be on the list, as green energy seems like one of the closest, and most achievable, challenges to realize within the next 10-15 years.

Fusion Energy is on the cusp of a major breakthrough, faster computers, better materials, and updates to previously tested designs make today a very exciting time to watch how fusion energy will come to fruition.This link explains what new breakthroughs are going on at the Max-Planck Institutes, located all over Germany. It also explains why we need to pursue fusion energy if we are to sustain a growing population. Furthermore, it is shown that most of the work done in the process of streamlining this technology, is in the simulations that are run, which requires vast amounts of computational speed & power. This is where a new model being developed comes in. Called a “Stellarator”, this upgrade on the old “Tokamak” design helps control fluctuations in the plasma vortex, while also helping control outbursts with more magnets. This was also important to the group, as this technology, at the moment, seems to rely a lot on supercomputers. As running a lot of simulations before building seems to be the best way to figure something out, but it also requires computers with amazing processing speeds.


7. Evaluating and Controlling Technology

Written by Nicholas Rowland

The evaluation and controlling of technology, more often than not, leads most to think about the negativity within, or the applications, involved with that technology. Beginning with just writing down our ideas paper, to nuclear weapons, and now new threats with the internet. All had their time in the evaluation stage of it’s creation, and is now in the control stage of it’s existence.Our group felt this was a perfect article for this topic. As it seems the biggest names in science and technology share our fears of a technology that could have grave consequences, coming together to sign a petition that asks to ban weaponry that contains artificial intelligence. Names such as Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and almost one thousand other top names in their field. A petition such as this is the epitome of evaluating and controlling technology, as we can force what can happen in the future, and we are making steps to stop that from happening. This is a somewhat controversial issue among some, and even in our own group, but we do agree that the article is very good.

The internet is easily one of the most world changing things to happen in the last 20 years. Communication, media, finance, and almost every other aspect of our lives has become faster and easier to access and complete than ever before. This privilege doesn’t come without it’s risks though, and that is why this video is important to our group. Focusing on net neutrality, the aforementioned video explains, firstly how the internet is run, using the analogy of “a series of pipes”, which consists of large lines that are trans-oceanic, from continent to continent. Our faucet of internet is only a small fraction of what is available in those larger lines, but we are able to access mostly anything we want, whenever. The purpose of this video is because internet providers feel like they should be a filter for speed and content, thus making us pay more for faster and better access. This is wrong, as these corporations could essentially shut down business they don’t like, once having this absolute power. Also, it doesn’t make sense to let a company limit how much you are able to use of their utility, we wouldn’t let a power company give us less power than we needed to run our household would we? We as a group strongly support net neutrality.


8. Risks, Failures and Responsibilities

Written by Kavya Rajagopala (Edited by Nicholas Reed)

This article talks about how most technologies were not safe when they first came out, and became much safer over time. It is a very good resource on the topic and extensively goes into multiple facets, even physical ones like RSI. It later goes on to identify causes, changes made due to failures, and the reality that is these issues. That is to say, while sometimes large, the issues are a statistical minority and are present in other new technologies in the past. Computing technology has helped make other technologies, such as automobiles and airplanes, vastly safer over time. It does have unique properties such as it being trusted with far more than anything has ever before. This means not only that it has the potential to bring great benefits, and also that its failures have larger consequences. We felt that this was important to understand for not just the unit, but also for the course in general.

This is an article about a relatively recent series of incidents in which Chinese hackers broke into databases that contained government worker data, which includes things like social security numbers. The issue happened primarily due to a failure of security and policy in several areas on the part of the U.S. government and some of its contractors. The fear now is that China will gain leverage over these employees, some of which deal with secret materials and documents. This could obviously be bad news for the U.S. and potentially companies residing inside it. This great example of both the failure of the computers, which are never 100% secure, and of the responsibility that the government and contractors had to protect that data is why our group chose it.


9. Anytime, Anywhere

Written by Kavya Rajagopala (edited by Joe Neto)

This article gives reasons why using smartphones on campus' has made them safer for students.  They play an important role in improving and bringing awareness to both the campus and its society. The article talks about finding the ways to take advantage of the combination of communication and geo-location features to enhance campus safety instead of relying on "blue light" phones in fixed locations. And many campuses are building their own mobile apps, often partnering with entrepreneurial students to create cutting-edge, user-friendly tools. Our group felt that it was important to shed light on the safety advantages of having the "anytime/anywhere" ability to connect. This ability certainly can assist us should we every be attacked, lost, or in a serious emergency. The technology used in this article will allow thousands of students to feel safer on campus, in a world where campus attacks happen more frequently than we like to acknowledge.

In this 8 part series about how we live with technology in our day-to-day lives. Some examples of topics covered are: 

Gratification - We receive from communicating socially over the internet with friends, family, and often complete strangers.
Knowledge - We have instant access to is larger than it has ever been in the history of the world, all at our fingertips.
Convenience - Having everything at your fingertips have made us a little more reliant on our smart devices to do the thinking for us, or entertain us.
Relationships - Can take shape from an online interaction with a person clear across the globe, the internet has brought us closer to people we normally would never meet in our regional locations.
Privacy - Has been infringed upon, the more we are connected, the more our privacy is invaded. The more we put up on the net, the more of our private lives gets exposed.
Fame - This be achieved in many formats today. The digital media revolution has brought forth terms such as "YouTube star" to your daily vocabulary.
Consequences - They are often an afterthought, but should be taken more seriously. Your actions could be posted for all to see, or you could invite harm into your life if you are not careful. There are a lot more ways to be exposed for things you would rather keep private.

Our group chose to article because it was a insightful and well researched resource by a local newspaper that covers how having the access to technology 24/7 has reshaped and redefined our society, and the way we interact with each other. This is an important factor in how our society will continue to take shape, with the continued advancements of technology, and our continued use of technology to be socially active and aware.


10. Technology Advances, Social Trends

Written by Lizeth Tapia (edited by Joe Neto, Nicholas Reed)

This article presents information about the growth of technology, computers in particular, in an quantitative graph form. The graphs show that humanity has come a very long way in our pursuit of making smarter brains, and this is especially apparent in Moore's Law. According to Moore’s Law the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. This prediction ended up becoming a law of sorts since it turned out to be very accurate, and one can see this in the graphs on the webpage. This exponential rate of growth has continued for years and every now and then we think we have reached the limit, yet we keep surpassing it. There is a physical limit to what we can do with current technology, and that is when a transistor is only a few atoms in size. At that point we must move to other technologies, like quantum computing (video explaining the basics here https://youtu.be/JhHMJCUmq28). The group felt like this article related to the main topic and it gives a a great example of how technology has advanced in society through the years, and will continue to advance.

Technology has become increasingly advanced with time, to the point where limitations and new abilities change on a weekly, if not daily basis. In this article our group was introduced to li-fi technology, which is a wireless technology that transmits high-speed data using visible light communication (VLC). The upside of li-fi is that it is 100 times faster than our current top wi-fi speeds, the downside is that line of sight to the source is needed, though considering it is light it's easy to see how this is solvable, light bulbs. This would speed up networks and download/upload speeds greatly, and provide more bandwidth for the increase in the amount of connections by devices belonging to the Internet of Things. Additionally, li-fi is said to be more secure than wi-fi, due to this line of sight necessity, your neighbor cant steal your internet anymore! The growth in bandwidth and the increased speed in the transferring of data is going to be an important factor in the growth and adaptation of the Internet, for years to come, because of this our group chose this article.

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