Saturday, April 23, 2011

New Technology.. Where is it going?

What does the future hold with new technologies?
To begin researching this subject, I simply type into google's search engine "new technology"

This yielded several technology based magazine site links.

most of them giving reviews of the latest technology based products available today, like the link below

http://www.gizmag.com/

and another large number of my results led me to technology news.

like this one -- http://www.newscientist.com/section/tech

one link told of story of how technology has began having an impact on more relationships.
http://www.newscientist.com/section/tech

These were more helpful, but I decided to revise my search for more of how technology will change in the future.

This time, I searched in google... "Where technology is going"

As I scanned through the results, I felt these would give better feedback.

The first link I clicked on gave several links throughout its website about various aspects of technology and how they view it changing years from now.

http://www.slate.com/id/2287764/landing/1/

I enjoyed reading the many articles that the above link gave.

Another link, I discovered, was a link to a pdf file of a research paper written by the International Center for Leadership in Education.

http://www.leadered.com/pdf/whereistechnologygoing.pdf

It gave a lot of good examples of where technology is heading.

But this last article I read really seemed to give a good, logical guesstimation of where technology will be in our near future.

http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/where-technology-is-going-2567489.html

As stated from articlebase.com

  1. By 2012, users of smart phone will be more than regular phone.
  2. By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain.
  3. By 2049, a $1000 computer might have computational capabilities which will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species



Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/where-technology-is-going-2567489.html#ixzz1KPh3ma3k 
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Saturday, March 26, 2011

The Reaction to Television in it's Early Days -- 1920-1941

In my English class, I have to write a paper about the reactions to television when it was first introduced, during WWI.  Since I already have to do some research on this subject, I decided I would make a note of my research for my second blog topic for the night.

So... what were the reactions of society when television was first introduced?

I began my research on google's website.  I typed, "reactions to television in its early days" in the search bar.

This yielded me a good 46,000,000 results, plus some.

After going through 5 pages of the Gooooogle results, I decided to revise my search a bit.

My next search read "Televisions introduction and society's reaction"

This didn't help much either, so I thought hard on another way to revise my search.

I tried this search next... "television first introduced and the public reaction"

I did find a timeline of the introduction of television to different countries, but nothing that seemed to come close to answering my question.

Once again, I revised my search.  This time, I tried... "how people reacted to the invention of television"

One link, I found, did give some useful information.

http://www.inventionreaction.com/famous-inventions/Television-Set

I now have a better knowledge of the invention of the television.

This link also gave about an equally good amount of information about the timeline of the invention of the television.

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/invention-of-television.html

I decided to tweak the current search I had.  It now says " "reactions" to the invention of television "

I ended up finding a link where someone was given a similar question for an assignment.

http://theordinarywebsite.com/snapshots/html/1900_39.htm

When the student asked their grandmother how she reacted when seeing a television for the first time, this was her response....
She was amazed by it. When she first saw a TV, it was in the front window display of a store. On the screen, there was a green background and fizzy images of people jumping up and down. When she got her first TV, the picture was clearer but it only got about three channels.

This was a good start for the research for my paper.  I at least have one good reaction so far, and a lot of good information gathered about the invention of the television and a timeline of its evolution.

Information Overload

When I was given the topic "Information Overload"  I wasn't quite sure what to think.  What does it mean to have an overload of information.

To find out more about the topic, I typed in the google search bar "information overload".

I went through several links.

But on page 3 of the results, I found this link

http://www.infogineering.net/understanding-information-overload.htm

Not only did this link explain to me what exactly it meant to have an overload of information, it also gave a history of how it came to be.

infogineering.net states:
Information Overload is an increasing problem both in the workplace, and in life in general. Those that learn to deal with it effectively will have a major advantage in the next few years. 
Information Overload is when you are trying to deal with more information than you are able to process to make sensible decisions. The result is either that you either delay making decisions, or that you make the wrong decisions.

We are living in the "Information Age", and sometimes the amount of information that we receive at once can become overwhelming, leading to information overload.  We have to learn to multi-task and use the information given to us in an effective and efficient way.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Dairy Queen

So Dairy Queen just opened back up on March 1st.  I've noticed how incredibly busy they have been since opening for the spring, and I was interested in knowing who founded such a profitable business?

I began my search in good with this question "Who founded Dairy Queen?"

This brought up 754,000 results.
A couple of links down, I found the Dairy Queen Blog.

http://blog.dairyqueen.com/blizzard/operationhappybirthday/

It was nice to look at, but I went back to my results.

I'm always curious to see what wikipedia has, so with it being my very first result, I gave it a click.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_Queen

After checking the sources, I decided this site could give me my answer.

Dairy Queen, often abbreviated DQ, is a chain of soft serve and fast food restaurants owned by International Dairy Queen, Inc, who also owns Orange Julius
The soft serve formula was first developed in 1938 by John Fremont "Grandpa" McCullough (1871‒1963),[1] his son Alex McCullough, and Ronald Baker.
These guys convinced their friend and customer to offer their product in his store in Illinois.

On the first day of sales, Noble dished out more than 1,600 servings of the new dessert within two hours.[7] Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store in 1940 in Joliet, Illinois.
Since 1940, DQ has used a franchise system to expand its operations globally.  DQ was an early pioneer of food franchising, expanding its 10 stores in 1941 to 100 by 1947, 1,446 in 1950, and 2,600 in 1955.  The company became International Dairy Queen, Inc. (IDQ) in 1962. It was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 1998. Dairy Queens were a fixture of social life in small towns of the Midwestern and Southern United States during the 1950s and 1960s.

So Dairy Queen has been successful since the beginning.  And three men together developed the formula and it just progressed from there.  

Digital Privacy vs. Anonymity

Since I don't know much about the topic assigned this week, I just decided to ask the question "What is the difference between Digital Privacy and Anonymity?"

The first thing I did to begin my research was type this search into the google search bar... "difference between digital privacy and anonymity"

The first result sparks my interest so I click on it

http://www.alphapatrol.com/blog/52/anonymity-vs-privacy.html

This blog archive says that each of these are quite different.  This link gives the definition of both items searched.

Definitions say:
Anonymity is a condition in which an individual’s true identity is unknown.
Privacy is the state of not being seen by others.
So the difference is that your anonymous browsing doesn't have to be private.

In other words, anonymity protects your identity but does not protect your private data, if you expose them.
 I clicked on a couple of other links listed none of them gave as much good information.

These were the other links that I explored:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jun/14/guardianweeklytechnologysection

http://www.niksula.hut.fi/~eklund/Opinnot/netsec.html

These links became useless.


So I learn from Alpha Patrol all that I need to answer my question.

so when you you are on the internet communicating anonymously, but you do not encrypt your data on your machine, it can be readable on exit point, and that means that your privacy will be compromised.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Smartphone Technology

I own a smartphone, and I know from experience that once you have one you won't want anything different.  When my teacher said that the topic for this week's blog post was smartphone technology, I got pretty excited.  Who wouldn't like to know a little more about the smart-phone's technology? But what I thought people would like to know better is.. How is a smartphone's technology different from any other phone?
 
I began my research the usual way.
I went to google.com and typed in the search bar "smartphone technology vs. any other phone"

Although I thought this search would be a little more successful, it gave me many results on different smartphone's vs. specific others and several other useless links.

Lets revise our search to "cutting edge technology in smartphones"

This gave a bit better results.

I put this link in a tab first

http://emergingfactor.com/technology/evolution-of-smartphones-led-by-cutting-edge-display-technologies/

Which wasn't what I was looking for, so I moved on with my search.


The next link I click on wasn't any better, and gave even less information.

http://cetechnology.net/tag/smartphones/


So I decided to revise my search once again.  This time I searched "how are smartphones different from other phones"

AND about 4 links down I find a promising result.

http://cellphones.about.com/od/smartphonebasics/a/what_is_smart.htm

In a nutshell, a smartphone is a device that lets you make telephone calls, but also adds in features that you might find on a personal digital assistant or a computer.
Now that you know better what a smartphone is, how did it evolve to what it is?

In the beginning, there were cell phones and personal digital assistants (or PDAs). Cell phones were used for making calls--and not much else--while PDAs, like the Palm Pilot, were used as personal, portable organizers. A PDA could store your contact info and a to-do list, and could sync with your computer. Eventually, PDAs gained wireless connectivity and were able to send and receive e-mail. Cell phones, meanwhile, gained messaging capabilities, too. PDAs then added cellular phone features, while cell phones added more PDA-like (and even computer-like) features. The result was the smartphone.
A smartphone has an operating system similar to that on your computer, it holds software and has web access, and is still able to do messaging to and from different phones and through email.  So to sum it up, when you get a smartphone it isn't just a cell phone, it is a mini laptop that can be used to help you be more productive in slim, compact way

Sunday, February 20, 2011

How are wikileaks different from general news we hear every day?

The question for my research today is going to be about wikileaks.  But before I begin, I need to find out what wikileaks are?

Using google's search engine, I searched "wikileaks"
With 84,500,000 results found.

After skipping the ad links, I click on the first result

http://213.251.145.96/

and this site was confirmed by wikipedia's link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

To begin my research I find that
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks
But what I want to know is... How are wikileaks different from general news we hear every day?

I looked over the main website for wikileaks, which I posted above, but I found all of my information to answer my question today on the wikipedia link

WikiLeaks is not affiliated with Wikipedia or the Wikimedia FoundationIts website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press[5] organisation,[6] claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. 
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, WikiLeaks releasedAfghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.[10] In October 2010, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organisations. This allowed every death in Iraq, and across the border in Iran, to be mapped.[11] In November 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. State department diplomatic cables.
Although wikileaks has received praise as well as criticism, it has won several awards and in 2010, the New York City Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that could totally change the news" 

Wikileaks isn't afraid to show the public the truth of certain events.  They find news links to inform us of what is truly going on in the world instead of "buttering it up" like the general news seems to do.  U.S. government officials have criticized Wikileaks saying that they expose classified information and they claim that the links could potentially harm society.  They use mirror sites to hold their databases.  

Saturday, February 12, 2011

What encouraged American Idol to pick their new judges?

2011 is Season 10 of American Idol.  A long running.

I have never been a huge fan, but I enjoy watching it.  This season in particular has been very entertaining.  But my question was what encouraged them to pick the judges they did.

I believe they were amazing choices, but to fulfill my curiosity I will research this question.

In the google search bar I typed in "American Idol new judges"

This brought up 2,480,000 results....

But not many that looked to answer my question.

so I revised my search to "why 2011 american idol judges were chosen"

wikipedia told me all about American Idol : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Idol

but it didn't answer my questio.

Then I found this link.

http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2010/09/american-idol-judges-on-why-they-chose-to-do-idol-what-their-families-think.html

Apparently, these stars "chose" themselves to be apart of the show. 

That's good enough for me. 
Who wouldn't want them as judges?  They would have more experience than anyone with what the American Idol would be doing after winning the show

What happened in Egypt that led to the protests?

First, I had to find out what exactly the Egypt Protests were, so that I could come up with a question to research about it.

After clicking on the below link, I decided I'll be researching "What happened in Egypt that led to the protests in 2011?"

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=ldymls&xhr=t&q=egypt+protests&cp=9&qe=ZWd5cHQgcHJv&qesig=J5NbBKAHjnwX_FkW6DallA&pkc=AFgZ2tnxL2gwhvfWblEnF-FgVQDHJG7hSnG5hBC1--PGmXsdMs_tPHv8EIhGbd6jmNz-UXeSeKbcdsyUz0El2l5_N7xlMYLENw&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=0z&aqi=&aql=&oq=egypt+pro&pbx=1&fp=506afe366bdeb92b

The demonstrations and riots, part of the 2010–2011 Arab world protests, started in the weeks after similar events in Tunisia, with many protesters carrying Tunisian flags as a symbol of their influence.[16] Grievances for Egyptian protesters have focused on legal and political issues[17] including police brutality,[11] state of emergency laws,[11] lack of free elections and free speech,[18] and corruption,[18] as well as economic issues including high unemployment,[19] food price inflation,[19] and low minimum wages
This Egyptian Revolution of 2011 included a series of marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labor strikes and violent clashes.  They began on Jan. 25th of this year.

I found a little bit of Quantitative information that I thought I would share as well.
As of 29 January, at least 105 deaths had been reported, and those injured number 750 policemen and 1,500 protesters

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Whatever happened to Shirley Temple?

While watching television a commercial comes on about Shirley Temple.  They show all those cute clips of Shirley as a child star.  And I have yet to see anything else of her.  So as I wondered what happened to Shirley Temple, I made my decision to do my research on just that.

Choosing my favorite search engine once again.. I typed in the google search bar, "Whatever happened to Shirley Temple?"

My very first search result is verbatim http://ask.yahoo.com/20010809.html from ask.yahoo.com 

And wouldn't you know it, this link gave me all the information I needed to answer my question.


As Shirley Temple grew older her films became less successful so she was happy to go to high school and live a normal life.
In 1945, Shirley married actor John Agar, and they had a daughter in 1948. She continued to make films sporadically, but in 1949, she retired from the big screen at the age of 21. In the same year, Shirley and John Agar divorced. In 1950, she met entrepreneur Charles Alden Black, and they later married and had two children in the early 1950s.
And this site also gave a list of her adult accomplishments:
  • From 1958-1961, she hosted children's TV shows and appeared in TV movies for children.
  • In 1969, she was a United States Delegate to the United Nations.
  • In 1972, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She eventually went public with the disease to encourage breast cancer screening for women.
  • From 1974-1976, she was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Ghana.
  • In 1976, she became the first female U.S. Chief of Protocol.
  • From 1989-1993, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, which became the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic during her term.
  • In 1998, she received a lifetime achievement medal at the Kennedy Center Honors.
I admire her.
 

This former child star is now in her 70's and lives with her husband in California.  She is also involved in various world policy organizations. 

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Murray State University's History

While I was thinking about what I would like to know about Murray State's history, I ran across a lot of thoughts. 
What do I already know about Murray State?  
Not much really... so I could possibly just look up "everything" there is to know.  But that could get pretty lengthy, and most likely boring. 
Then I thought, well who founded Murray State?  Cause I don't know the answer to that.
But most likely many students already do, and that's a bit too general and I'm assuming most students will actually choose that.  
So then I decided that I AM a Business Major, and Murray State apparently has a whole "College of Business" area, so my question today is:

When did Murray State begin their Business Department? 

The first thing I did was search in google.... Murray State's College of Business 
This got me a great amount of results.  I skipped the paid advertising link and clicked the very first link from murray states website.  


http://www.murraystate.edu/business.aspx

This link was great, it gave me a nice introductory to the College of Business at Murray State and a link to all the departments available in this College.  BUT it didn't answer my question.  not even close

Moving on.... down a couple links I find one called Murray State University> About College of Business.
That sounded like it may have what I'm looking for, so I clicked on it. 

http://www.murraystate.edu/Academics/CollegesDepartments/CollegeOfBusiness/AboutCOB.aspx 

While this gave some good things to know, once again I was still left with no answer. 
So... I decided to revise my search.

This is what I searched:  "When did Murray State include College of Business"
  
AND by some luck of the draw, my first result is a WINNER! 


http://murray.stateuniversity.com/sub/College-of-Business-and-Public-Affairs.html


Wow, this link gave me pretty much everything I need to know about Murray State's College of Business.
The College of Business and Public Affairs was founded in 1966 and is located on the main campus, in its own building. Courses also are offered at Paducah, Hopkinsville, Madisonville, and Henderson (MBA).
 
This surprised me.  In my thought process I didn't think that the College of Business had been around for over 40 years But it makes sense because it was around then that computers and technology became popular.
This link also gave me great information on the College of Business Academics and what is involved in getting my MBA.

So all in all this was a successful and pretty quick search process.     




 

Monday, January 31, 2011

What was the Enron Scandal?

In my BPA 140 class today, my teacher mentioned the Enron scandal.  I wanted to research and I find out what happened.

The first thing I did was look up "Enron scandal" in the google.com search bar.  I skipped the wikipedia link, and went straight to the one from www.time.com  It gives several articles on everything behind the Enron scandal.

http://www.time.com/time/2002/enron/#

After skipping through a couple more links, I found BBC News, who summarizes the whole scandal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1780075.stm

Apparently in just 15 years Enron grew to be America's seventh largest company.  But the firm's success turned out to be an elaborate scam.  Enron lied about its profits.  It wasn't til an employee finally decided to be a whistleblower, only after addressing the CEO a couple of times about the lies.  When the deception unfolded, it forced the firm into bankruptcy.

This was pretty interesting.  Definitely something to keep in mind when thinking about Business Ethics.  

Sunday, January 30, 2011

What is the State of the Union Address?

I want to find out what the State of the Union address is.  I've heard of it but am not completely sure as to what it is.
So the first thing I did was type in just that into google's search bar.
"the State of the Union Address"

The first link that pops up is from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_Union_address

As stated from wikipedia "The State of the Union is an annual address presented by the President of the United States to the United States Congress."

This practice arose from a command given to the President in the constitution of the United States.

"He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." 
- Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution




Although you have to watch wikipedia, because it can be written by anybody.  This particular article has very creditable sources.



I found the State of the Union address for 2011, where President Barack Obama gave his remarks on January 25th at the link below
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/25/remarks-president-state-union-address


The white house would most likely have to be as creditable as you can get when giving information on any of the President's remarks.  This link gives his entire speech.



Still using www.google.com, I found videos in full of the President giving his first State of the Union address.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTMrs9vpoqg 


The link above is from CBS News Special Report and is live.  

On a lighter note, I also found a link to make the State of the Union address a little more interesting:
http://www.drinkinggame.us/

Apparently someone made a list of the most common things said during this annual speech and made it into a drinking game.  Probably not the best way to spend your time, but I found it amusing.


So in conclusion, I now know that once a year the president has to present the State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress to report on the condition of he nation.