Technology Bringing them Closer

I've had a few posts lately talking about the bad and harm that our advanced technology has caused, but their is some enlightening. A military dad reads a book to her in a recording. The article and video with it was very moving and shows a positive outlook on technological advancements that are moving and empowering. The video is very sentimental and really enjoyable to watch.

The article reads:

"The little girl looks captivated by her father reading, and she follows along, smiling and babbling at times as he reads to her from one of her favorite picture books about Mickey Mouse.

After a few pages her dad asks, “Can I have a hug?” and the toddler leans in, nuzzles up to the avatar of her dad, and hugs the screen. She smiles, gives him a kiss, thanks him for the story and finally, waves goodbye.

“Bye bye,” she says in a voice that could break your heart.

The girl’s father made several videos of himself talking and reading before he left for basic training for the Air Force in Texas, the family told “Good Morning America.”

“It was very difficult on our daughter, as she didn’t understand why he was leaving and how long he’d be gone,” the girl’s mother said. “Each day she would ask to see Daddy and we’d play one.”

While watching the video this time, the family’s cat knocked something off of a shelf, so the little girl’s babble is “Daddy, silly kitty,” her mom explained.

The mother said the video is “priceless” to her family and that she had “no idea” when she posted it on YouTube that it would spark such interest.

“It is a sacrifice to join the military, but thanks to technology today, it doesn’t have to be quite so painful,” she told us. “We are very proud of our airman!”"

The website url is:http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/toddler-watches-military-dad-read-prerecorded-bedtime-story-230741436.html

US's most powerful nuclear bomb being dismantled

The articles was found at:

http://news.yahoo.com/uss-most-powerful-nuclear-bomb-being-dismantled-071325260.html

Whats more interesting than a weapon so powerful, that the government and society are destroying it.

"The last of the nation's most powerful nuclear bombs — a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

The final components of the B53 bomb will be broken down Tuesday at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility. The completion of the dismantling program is a year ahead of schedule, according to theU.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, and aligns with President Barack Obama's goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons."

Why create such dangerous weapons to begin with. I agree that all nuclear weapons should be destroyed. We have become more advanced in this field than we ever should have. My fear is that we will not be killed off by things like 2012, or an apocalypse, but instead by ourselves. We have given and shown power that can be created around the world and it has been. The amount of greed we have has kept and Arms Race going on with other countries, and the amount of greed to be on top and more powerful. What has our technological advancements caused, and will it end our technology by destroying it in the end.

The rest of the article was:

"First put into service in 1962, when Cold War tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the B53 weighed 10,000 pounds and was the size of a minivan. According to the American Federation of Scientists, it was 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

The B53 was designed to destroy facilities deep underground, and it was carried by B-52 bombers.

Since it was made using older technology by engineers who have since retired or died, developing a disassembly process took time. Engineers had to develop complex tools and new procedures to ensure safety.

"We knew going in that this was going to be a challenging project, and we put together an outstanding team with all of our partners to develop a way to achieve this objective safely and efficiently," said John Woolery, the plant's general manager.

Many of the B53s were disassembled in the 1980s, but a significant number remained in the U.S. arsenal until they were retired from the stockpile in 1997. Pantex spokesman Greg Cunningham said he couldn't comment on how many of the bombs have been disassembled at the Texas plant.

The weapon is considered dismantled when the roughly 300 pounds of high explosives inside are separated from the special nuclear material, known as the pit. The uranium pits from bombs dismantled at Pantex will be stored on an interim basis at the plant, Cunningham said.

The material and components are then processed, which includes sanitizing, recycling and disposal, the National Nuclear Security Administration said last fall when it announced the Texas plant's role in the B53 dismantling.

The plant will play a large role in similar projects as older weapons are retired from the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal."

Paranormal Activity 3

If you have not yet seen this movie, then it is a must see. Even if the reviews have not been the best for the movie, it is a knock out. Whats more creepy then a little girl having a friend named "Toby", that is haunting you and caught on tape. The whole movie series has been a mind blowing encounter. I think this movie shows how crazy our technology has advanced with movie production. We are able to create scenes and footage, that was unimaginable only years ago. With this i think the effect on scary movies is way more drastic and surreal. The combination of work is mind-blowing and the link attached has some scene's that were both left out, and changed. The manipulation of difference is extreme but the overall effect of the movie is still prominent.

Attached is a link for those of you who would like to view parts of the new movie:

http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/the-projector/five-shots-paranormal-activity-3-trailers-weren-t-165710359.html

Netflix in Trouble..

The article I read was Netflix stock plunges on brutal 3Q, somber outlook, and it talks about how the Netflix jolted its shareholders again with a third-quarter finical report that portrayed a company in crisis.

One part in that I found was really interesting was:

"The video subscription service's latest blooper reel, released Monday, included an even larger customer exodus than the company had foreseen after announcing an unpopular price increase in July. What's worse, the report contained a forecast calling for more defections during the next few months.The backlash will deprive Netflix Inc. of some of the revenue that management had been counting on to finance the company's expansion plans while it pays higher fees for Internet video streaming rights. The result: Netflix expects to post losses next year when it starts selling its steaming service in Britain and Ireland. The company didn't offer further specifics besides saying it won't go into any other overseas markets until it's making money again."

The reason why this article really interested me is because it talks about how the company has filed a crisis, but what does this mean for consumers. A lot of people pay for their online streaming and DVD services, and if the company has had a major drop in their stocks and cash flow, should we see another rise in price. Even more, should we suspect another gimmick to get more money from its users. Its recent separation of online and DVD's was enough of a drop of services for more money, so what can we expect with this increased cash problem?

If Netflix does fail, it makes you wonder what company will be in its place to take over the need or consumers?

YouTube Insult Generator: Are you Safe?

The article I read on the new YouTube Insult Generator absolutely blew my mind away. This new machine pulls the best slights from the video's site's comments section. The picture they had displayed in the article was the search engine looking up Lady Gaga. Under the search bar the results for the generator pulled up with comments like:
You can't dance
You wish you had a cool Nebraskan guy.:D
You dont kno good music when you hear it.
You are too normal for this song...
You are monsters
Younes ont de la merde dans le oreilles !! 175 people have shit in your ears...!

The article states how this generator has turned rudeness into an art form, and a new "search engine for insults" lets you easily harvest the fruits of their ludicrous invective. One of the most interesting lines that the article contained about the comments were that" Oftentimes offensive, poorly punctuated and riddled with misspellings, some might argue that YouTube comments are a sign of the impending end of the human race.".

The blog then mentions:

"The simple tool, created by EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, is a search engine that takes a term, then uses the YouTube API to find videos relevant to that term and grabs the latest 50 comments. From those 50 search results, the generator finds the ones that start with a number followed by terms such as “people,” “nincompoops” or “youtubers” (key aspects of quality comments), then replaces the number and the word “people” with the word “you.”

So far, Holovaty’s act of “poor man’s data mining,” which he said took about 45 minutes to build, only finds comments about 50 percent of the time. But some of its findings are pretty good (try “Tom Cruise,” “Michael Jackson” or even “Wired” — the results are amusing, but a little too blue to republish here).

“I’m really interested in creating order from madness, and I like keeping an eye out for structured data in odd places,” Holovaty said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Any competent programmer can build, say, blog software, or a Groupon clone, or some boring web app, but to make something truly witty, from a programming perspective, now that’s something to aspire to.”

What terms should you try if you want to take Holovaty’s YouTube Insult Generator for a spin? Pop-culture figures work well (see the Lady Gaga example above). Enjoy and, if you must, put the best insults the generator unearths in the comments below."

The article and the generator was really interesting to learn about and that someone has used their time to create such a tool. I think that the uses for this generator will not play a helpful role, but become misused by the public.

iPhone 4 s

I thought after all my blogs that it would be appropriate to finally post from the phone itself now that I finally have it. I am an apple lover and am amazed by this new phone. It was well worth the wait!

Survey Results

Survey Results:

The survey was collected via Facebook.

An accumulative of 35 surveys were completed.

For the first question (What media do you use for a source of news? (Select all that apply)):
The collective answer was Television with 80%. Next was Online sources with 74.3%, Newspaper with 57.1%, Social Media with 40%, Radio with 37.1%, and Magazine with 22.9%.

The second question (Which type of news do you most commonly read?):
The collective answer was Local with 37.1%. Next was Entertainment with 22.9%, World News with 17.1%, National with 11.4%, Sports with 8.6%, and Regional with 2.9%.

The third question (What form of media do you find most reliable?):
The collective answer was Television with 51.4%. Next was Newspaper with 28.6%, Online Sources with 11.4%, Radio with 5.7%, Social Media with 2.9%, and Magazine with 0%.

The fourth question (What kinds of Online Sources do you most commonly use? Please List any that apply(Example: yahoo.com, cnn.com,ect.):
The collective answer was yahoo.com.

The fifth question (Are there any sources that you find opinionated or unreliable when looking for news stories? (Please List all that Apply)):
The collective answer was Fox News.

The sixth question (How reliable do you find the Online Sources?):
The collective answer was Neutral with 68.6%, then Very Reliable with 31.4% and in last was Not Reliable with 0.0%.

The seventh question (What is your age and gender?):
The collective answer was female, in the 20-30 range of age.

I thought that the survey was really interesting because cumulatively it was found that the public thought that online sources were reliable, and did used them as an active source of news. Also, i thought it was interesting how even though they found television to be the most reliable source of news, it was FOX news that they found most unreliable and biased. Also, the age group was interesting in a way that we are brought up around the more internet computer based generation and it resulted in yahoo.com being a good internet source, and that you can trust online sources. I wonder if more elder people were to take this same survey if it would have effected the results greatly as they do not rely on technology as much as the younger generation does. It was a very interesting task, and the results were interesting to digest and see.

Death of the Keyboard: Laser-Guided Typing

The article was all about how virtual keyboards are upon us, and are soon to be taking over for the "bulky and breakable " keyboards we have now. Soon to be replaced by lasers and sensors, the Celluon Magic Cube is among the first wave of virtual keyboards to hit the market, a device that projects keys of light on to any flat surface, interprets your finger-tapping and sends each p and q to any Bluetooth device.

Along with the article there is a video available to watch. Aatma Studios in San Francisco took this new reality to an obvious fantasy with a video mock-up to the mythical iPhone 5 (just one of the sources to later break my heart with the iPhone 4s), using laser projection to make keyboards and thumb typing obsolete, so get right on that Apple.

The whole article was really interesting to watch, and to see how advanced we are getting with our technology. I think this is a good example of information technology and the way that we are moving so fast in a more virtual world. One thing that i hope to find an article on is the see through phone i believe is released in Japan.

Finally iPhone 4s!

It has finally come, the new iPhone. I must say I am very disappointed that the iPhone 5 is not out, but am very excited for all the new improvements to the new phone. Ohhh and to finally be getting an iPhone.

The new updates for the phone are supposed to be :
-Greater memory capacity
-Improved camera and video
-More powerful processor and graphics
-Improved battery life
-AirPlay mirroring
-Siri

The body of the phone remains the same and the improvements are more based on the internals.
I will be ordering the phone once i can make it home, and cannot wait to finally have it in my hands. Thank you Apple!

Don't fall for the Trickery..You may be decieved..

5 Things You Think Work, But Acutally Don't

This article was very interesting. Ever think that the button you push to at a crosswalk doesn't acutally work, well you might actually be right.
The article shows how not it all circumstances but in some the following might just be there for looks and actually have no real purpose.
1. The Elevator "Close Doors" Button
2. "HD" TV
3. Walk Signal Buttons
4. Butt-Toning Shoes
5. Office Thermostats

This article shows that it was cheaper to sometimes keep the buttons or machines, but the actual use may not be activated or need personnel permission. The website gives more detail about each one individually how they can be deceptive. It just makes you think how dependent we are that we believe that the technology will work, but when in reality we may just think that.

The website for the article was found at yahoo.com searching "5 Things You Think Work, But Actually Don't".

Mourn Felt Around the World..

Paris

Palo Atlo, California

Ginzo, Tokyo

Cupertino, CA

Chicago

Boston

Bejiing China

My previous post was of a memorial outside of NY's Apple Store, but i want to show the impact that this man had on others around the world, and the mourn was felt around the world. More area's pictures can be found on yahoo.com searching "Steve Jobs Memorial".

Steve Jobs Memorila

New York, NY- October 6th, 2011: Apples sit at a makeshift memorila for Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple Inc., outside the Apple Store on 5th Avenue on October 6, 2011. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)



I thought this was a really creative way to remember and show appreciation for Steve Jobs, and was a picture that was very interesting.