Privacy

Nowadays it seems almost impossible not to mention privacy when talking about computers. This may be because privacy is the biggest concern people tend to have when thinking about their use of technology and interaction with it.

In order to become part of the technological community we have to give a lot of our information (sometimes even without realizing it) and with the increase of networking now anyone can access that information and use it for whatever purpose they wish. So, now we are all connected but with what cost?

Privacy is important for people and it should be everyone’s right. People tend to think that the loss of privacy in somewhat good, because that way others wouldn’t have anything to hide; but I don’t think privacy is necessarily about hiding things, it is about not sharing all of your information to avoid harm and prevent risks. How would people feel if every small detail of their life was accessible by everyone at any time?

Computers and Work

This week we talked about machines and work. What I found interesting about this topic was how new technologies shape our ideas. Obviously computers have changed and reshaped our ideas about work, but also our ideas about wealth. This change in how we think about wealth is reflected in the changes of how we think about work and vice versa. Nowadays wealth is measured by how much stuff we have, and having more stuff means working more time and also somewhat less efficiently (maybe how we perform work is not necessarily less efficiently but the way we create material things is, now material goods last very little time). However, if work and our ideas if it keep changing (like they have in the last years), our ideas of wealth may too.

CBC Podcast

This week’s assigned podcast (“Is the Internet making us smarter or stupider?”) touches on a very controversial and yet important question about our interaction with the Internet. Because we are constantly interacting in and with the Internet, we all have opinions on this matter. I’m taking the Big Ideas course on the Internet and it was very interesting to see the debate that arouse from this topic, specially because Prof. Easterbrook also talked about his experience on CBC.

A very important point that came up during this class discussion was that when it comes to technologies, like the Internet, that are having such a big impact on us and our lives there is always going to both good and bad effects. The Internet is making us both smart and stupid, better and worse, slow and fast. Our interaction with the Internet has become so significant yet familiar that it seems we have stepped into a (sort of )“grey area” not recognizing when our interaction with it affect us negatively.

DrRacket Predictions

These past weeks the professor has suggested that we predict what will be the outcome of a new definition before actually running it on DrRacket. This has turned out to be a very useful exercise. Before I would just run the definitions without really knowing what they meant and now I feel I have a better understanding of the different components that make a definition and how the outcome changes depending on certain variables. It is also easier for me to spot what I need to review of the class because I can trace my mistakes back to specific topics. This also helped me a lot during the sneeze project, which consisted of making various definitions that together would create a model for a disease.

Wikipedia Articles

For this week’s assignment we where asked to make a sandbox that showed all the changes we wanted to make to certain Wikipedia articles. This sandbox shows what contributions we want to make without actually displaying in them in the original article.

It was really interesting to work on this project and learn how Wikipedia articles are created and edited. We use Wikipedia all the time however we don’t really stop to think about what is happening “behind the curtain”. I learned many things about how articles are made that I had no idea of, even thought I use Wikipedia almost every day.

Making Wikipedia articles is very easy, however, different form what I thought the articles are not written in the same way they are displayed. Special formats have to be used if you wish to make a text bold, add a link to it or make it a heading. The text displayed in the article and the sandbox version are not completely identical, however the information in them is.  Another thing that surprised me was that many times before actually submitting a change to an article people brainstorm about what must be edited and how the final article should look. These open online-discussions about the articles help incorporate everyone’s ideas and embrace teamwork, which are two of the main values of the Wikipedia community. Being able to learn this and putting it into practice during the assignment was a great experience.