c) playing with CICADA

I changed the positioning of the quick line about this page being a “sandbox” and italicized “course description” – very simple things, but I thought they were good structural changes. The whole process was pretty easy and organized – since only one person (or one group) could edit one page at a time, things went pretty smoothly. You can see where the page is now, how you want to change it, and if you need to consult with someone about making a change. I didn’t personally interact with anyone on this task; I didn’t think it was necessary for the relatively minor changes I made. Overall it seems pretty clear that trying to (and actually succeeding at) making adjustments to personalized wikis than an official article site on Wikipedia. I was expecting this, seeing as there aren’t any overarching powers stopping us from making changes to a private page that only 20 or so individuals can see in the first place.

The whole idea reminds me of our constitutional right of free speech and all of the controversy associated with it – you can have one hundred percent free speech as long as you are talking in a closed environment where you aren’t in a position to offend people (or enough people anyway) to create any problems. According to US law we can say whatever we want wherever we want within the United States as long as is isn’t libel or slander. However the more widespread the source of “speech” comes from (say, the New York Times) the more careful you have to be with what you say, because there are more people who could take offense and subsequently take legal action against the source (even if it was the truth that was written, or merely an opinion piece that makes no overarching claims).

However what concerns me mostly is that this leaves many open options for people to create slander in semi-closed environments. While the New York Times does not have the luxury of producing whatever it likes (due to its editors, funders, readers and so on) a small town paper does (more or less) of which there are thousands. Even though sending a message through many of these less widespread methods of communication would be less efficient than sending it through one extremely widespread one, the message can still get through loud and clear to enough people.

Rich and Poor - countries with the greatest disparities

While perusing the daily headlines I have on my Yahoo homepage, I came across a short article from Business Week about the top ten countries with the greatest disparity between the rich and the poor. I skimmed the article and my reaction was an interesting mix of both shocked and totally unsurprised that almost all of the countries are most often thought of as very wealthy, modern and brimming with fascinating culture. Just so that we’re on the same page, I’ll list the countries in order (there are a couple of ties in the mix): Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States, Israel, Portugal, New Zealand, Italy and Britain, Australia, Ireland and Greece.

These countries all have access to the highest levels of technology and their schools teach students (from what I understand at least) about the different forms of technology that are available to them. Particularly young people from all of these nations are up to date on web fads like Facebook, Wikipedia, blogs, and so on – I’ve learned from living overseas and meeting many people from different backgrounds that young people from my own generation pretty much have the same tech desires and knowledge (I know this is a broad generalization and I’m sure there are many examples to prove otherwise, but overall I would say that my claim isn’t unrealistic). I thought it was so bizarre that countries with so much opportunity for success, with some of the richest most powerful people in the world, just aren’t helping their own people to gain access to the bare minimum of the amazing facilities we have today.

This topic is particularly interesting for me because I grew up in Taiwan and Turkey (neither of which are on the list I’m happy to say) and I have friends who have lived in those other countries, and I never heard about the “poor” side of life in any of those places from them. Particularly Hong Kong and Singapore were the most shocking to me – I have a couple friends who attended the Singapore American School as expatriates, and another who is actually Singaporean but grew up overseas as well, and none of them have ever told me anything about the insane amounts of poverty that are clearly present there. I have a couple friends who have Hong Kong passports but grew up in Taiwan (they spend significant amounts of time there visiting family) and I’ve been to Hong Kong myself, but the poverty there never seemed to be a topic of discussion. I know about the poverty in the US and Australia, but I’ve never had to experience or even witness it properly, so I cannot even say that I fully comprehend the awful situations we have here either.

It seems to me that even with computer mediated communications we still aren’t using our knowledge to its full advantage (or to much of an advantage at all really) – we are too focused on getting that new iPod or whatever it is we desire, forgetting that there are millions of people who don’t even know what an iPod is, or can barely imagine that they exist in the first place.

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/107980/countries-with-the-biggest-gaps-between-rich-and-poor

Wow I realized I haven't updated this in a while - I've been taking notes by hand about things related to the course that I've noticed but I kept forgetting to put it up online. Clearly my dedication to blogs is lacking... my memory too... ah well.

I remember the day in class when we talked about bundling, because right after class I was watching TV and a Charter Cable ad came on and they just flat-out started talking about bundling (saying "bundle" every other second too, not just referring to it). I found another ad for Charter on youtube that I liked (I couldn't find the original one I saw on TV) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9asq4PIW3t4