Semester Down Under

2008-05-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

For the topic of my essay I have decided to cover the iPhone and BlackBerrys in their places in today’s communication filled world. I am going to be looking at the advancement of mobile technology since its creation. And I will also be asking the question of whether or not iPhones and BlackBerrys have helped society or hurt it. I will be looking at the history or mobile communication and compare the early stage mobile phones to the PDAs of today. I will also look at the impact that mobile phones have had on society.

Mobile technology started out as wireless radios that police and ambulances used to communicate with each other. Then in the 1940s Motorola developed a portable two way radio that could be worn on the back. This technology was developed for the US military and was large and bulky even by the standards of yesteryear. In the 60’s car phones were invented but would weigh up to 40kg and be very expensive.

Mobile communication later progressed to the first generation of handheld mobile phones. The first mobile phones were produced in Japan in the early 70’s from the earlier invention of the bag phone. The inventors of Japan examined the prior technology of he bag phone and condensed it into a hand held version. Even though the phone companies had reduced the mobile phone’s size and weight it was still a bulky and very expensive piece of technology. These phones didn’t become available in the United States until 1983 when Motorola designed and released the DanaTAC 8000X weighing 1kg. This phone weighed a considerable amount less when looking at the vast comparison to some of the car phones of the 60’s. Although a mobile phone weighing 1kg today would be extremely uncomfortable and awkward to handle by today’s standards.

Then came the second generation. The second generation was a faster more advanced way of signaling. This upgrade in generation also came with the improvement into smaller, lighter (100g-200g) phones. The advancement of batteries and electronics that were more energy friendly were the main reasons that mobile phones became smaller and lighter. The second generation also came with the introduction to SMS, the first person to person SMS was sent in 1993 with a second generation mobile phone.

And today mobile phones have become lighter, faster, more reliable, and have more features than could have ever been imagined at the time of their creations. Today’s ultimate phones are more along the lines of mobile workstations. Mobile phones have turned into Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and have completely revolutionized today’s business world. The iPhone and Blackberry brand PDAs are a near flawless synchronization of form and function. The iPhone weighs a mere 135g compared to the original 1kg for the first generation phones. The iPhone and Blackberry have the ability to make calls, send SMS messages, take photos and video, play music and videos, connect to the internet from anywhere, locate your exact location, along with many other features.

Since the creation of the mobile phone, society has changed. Accessibility has increased beyond belief, the business world has become more streamline than ever, and communication is at its pinnacle of simplicity and availability. Mobile phones have been used to keep in touch and stay connected with friends and family under nearly any situation. |Under traditional no-tech conditions, the difference between socially integrated and socially isolated individuals is levelled by the fact that even very highly integrated individuals are "lonely" during certain times: e.g. when they are on the move or physically distant from their kin and friends. Today, mobile phones allow these well-integrated people to display their social contacts even under such conditions of mobility and absence: standing thus out against socially isolated, marginal individuals at all times and places.| (Geser, 8). Without mobile phones socially integrated and isolated people are in fact the same in the situations where socially integrated people are away from their familiar surroundings. The mobile phone allows the socially integrated person to stay connected with friends and family thus amplifying the differences between the two different types of people. The mobile phone also lets us keep ties that may otherwise fall apart due to the lack of physical contact or the inability to communicate in person. It also strengthens our peripheral relationships because of its convenience and ease of use.

With the advantages of the mobile phone, there are also disadvantages. With all of the positives of the mobile phone, being its convenience, its convenience can also be a downfall. Mobile phones have been the cause of more and more traffic accidents since their creation. Studies have shown that drivers that are using their mobile phone have a much greater risk of having a traffic accident compared to those drivers that are not using their mobile phones. The number of traffic accidents due to mobile phones also correlates with the number of people who own mobile phones. |The percentage of accidents increased from 19% of all cellular phone involved accidents in 1992 to 32% in 1995. This result suggests that increased presence of cellular phones from 1992-1995 led to a higher percentage of accidents among drivers with phones.| (JM Violanti, 424-425). Drivers that were using their mobile phones at the time of their accidents accounted for 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries in the United States in 2002. |Drivers talking on cell phones were 18 percent slower to react to brake lights, the new study found. In a minor bright note, they also kept a 12 percent greater following distance. But they also took 17 percent longer to regain the speed they lost when they braked.| (Britt)

Although the disadvantages seem to be very harsh and serious, they are specific to certain situations and are few and far between in the grand scheme of the mobile phone. Mobile phones have had a bright and positive impact on society that has overshadowed the negatives beyond a reasonable doubt.

Beaton, John, and Judy Wajcman, comps. The Impact of the Mobile Telephone in Australia. Vers. 1. Sept. 2004. Australian Mobile Telecomunications Association. 04 May 2008 .

Britt, Robert R., comp. Drivers on Cell Phones Kill Thousands, Snarl Traffic. Vers. 1. 01 Feb. 2005. Live Science. 03 May 2008 .

Geser, Hans, comp. Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone. Vers. 3.0. May 2004. University of Zurich. 02 May 2008 .

May, Harvey, and Greg Hearn, comps. The Mobile Phone as Media. Vers. 8.2. July-Aug. 2005. Queensland University of Technology. 04 May 2008 .

Violanti, J M., comp. Cellular Phones and Traffic Accidents. Vers. 1. 9 June 1997. State University of New York - Buffalo. 02 May 2008 .

2008-05-11T20:37:00.000-07:00

iPhone
For the topic of my essay I have decided to cover the iPhone and BlackBerrys in their places in today’s communication filled world. I am going to be looking at the advancement of mobile technology since it's creation. I will also be asking the question of whether or not iPhones and BlackBerrys have helped society or hurt it. I will be looking at the history or mobile communication and compare the early stage mobile phones to the PDAs of today. I will also look at the impact that mobile phones have had on society.
I have been looking at both iPhones and BlackBerrys to see the features and technologies that both have. I have also been comparing them to the first mobile phones. I'm not going to go through every aspect of the history but I will cover some major landmarks in the history of the mobile phone. I will be looking at all of the features that todays 'super phones' have and discuss their relevance and necessity.
I have found many resources that I will be using to compare today's technology to yesterday's. I will be using two resources from the same website; one is reviewing the iPhone and the other is reviewing a BlackBerry PDA. I have also found some websites on the Apple web page itself that will help me the iPhone part of my essay. I will also be using information that I have found directly on the BlackBerry website. I am using these sites because they are guaranteed to be accurate in their information and are the most useful when searching for infon on their own products. I will also be using some websites that contain the history of the mobile phone.

http://www.cnet.com.au/mobilephones/phones/0,239025953,339272960,00.htm

http://www.macworld.com/article/54764/2007/01/liveupdate.html

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1355

http://www.cnet.com.au/mobilephones/pdaphones/0,239036203,240060486,00.htm

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/device-detail.jsp?navId=H0,C221,P883

http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/mobilephone.htm

2008-05-04T23:29:00.000-07:00

Word, Excel, and 3D Chats

Word
The exercises for Word were very simple and I didn't have many problems at all. For the most part the tasks were very simple, but when it got to the mail merge part I was a little confused. The mail merge itself wasn't that hard to figure out, but the instructions were a little hard to understand and they weren't very well written. I'm glad that I found out how to use that feature though because some companies will only hire you if you know how to do specific technical things with Word or Excel. I didn't know about the track changes feature and found that to be very interesting. I think that the track changes feature would be very useful when you are revising a paper or document to see what you have changed and to make sure that it wasn't better before you changed it. It would save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Excel
The exercises for Excel were also very simple for the most part. The tasks were the very basics; typing into cells, using formulas, making graphs. But the advanced task with the macros was something new to me. I had heard of them before and how they can be used to save time and help your whole process, but I had never used them before. As of right now there would be no real need for me to use the macros function but I can see how that can be very very useful to someone. In the future it may become a more important thing for me to know for my finances and things along those lines.

Habbo 3D Chat
I went onto Habbo to experience 3D chat. It was basically a normal chat room but with the a more humanized feeling to it. I felt that there was a lot more going on compared to the traditional instant messaging services. There wasn't really anything more that you can do that you can't do on regular IM, at least that's how it was with Habbo. Socializing in spaces like these makes it seem more personal and humanized rather than a box with text in it. I don't think it makes much of a difference, well at least it didn't to me. But I can see how people can feel more connected to the person that they are talking to if they have some sort of digital representation of them to look at while they are chatting. I think that applications of communication like this could eventually lead to a completely video chat room where the people can talk to everyone face to face using web cams.

2008-04-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia
This entry is going to be about examining two non-related articles on Wikipedia. The first article that I examined was on snowboarding. Overall it was an accurate article. There could have been much more information, but for the information that was provided it was all accurate. When reading I understood everything that had been written, but that's also because I snowboard and know all of the terminology. But if someone had no idea what it was, they might have trouble following some of the technical terminology. I think that today most of the earths population knows what snowboarding is, granted they may have never participated in the sport, but they know at least what it looks like. The article, for the most part, follows Widipedia's guidelines for the ideal article. The guidelines are: neutral, referenced, and encyclopedic, containing notable, verifiable knowledge. There was nothing written about how snowboarding is better than any other sport or that it was worse. There were references in some sections, but not all. And there was very little written that was opinion based. The article was very unbiased towards or against snowboarding.
If I were to change the article, I would add more specific information about each section. Each section, as is, has only a short amount of information written about the topic and had much room for expansion. I would also add some sort of term dictionary so that people that know less about the sport can look up terms that they don't know and find out what they mean to understand the article better.

The next article I reviewed was about my home town of Negaunee, Michigan. For the most part the article was fairly accurate. I'm not an expert on all of the history but from what I did know, it matched up with the article fairly well. I feel there was a lot of information that was left out and that could be put into the article to make it better. But for the most part the article covered the basis of what the city is about and how it came to be. The article somewhat followed the guidelines. Again the guide lines are: neutral, referenced, and encyclopedic, containing notable, verifiable knowledge. There were some things written that were bias towards Negaunee that makes me believe that a local resident wrote the article and not a historian from the area. The article did not have sources but it did have links to other sites related directly with Negaunee that you could check the information with. There was a lot of information that could be verified in the article but then again as I had mentioned earlier there was also some information that was bias and an obvious opinion of the author.
If I were to change the article in some way, I would go back through and re-write it using historical sites and texts. I would also add more detailed information, unlike the vague and brief synopsis of the city that was written in the article.

2008-04-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin wrote an article called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in which he writes about what is happening to art due to machines. At the time that Benjamin wrote the article, 1931, there was no such thing as photo shop, laptop computers, digital cameras, or digital camcorders.

In this day in age anyone can create digital things with a common household computer. When looked up in a dictionary, art is defined as -"The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance". The definition states that the digital media that everyone can create can be considered art. I feel differently.

When someone paints a picture or creates a sculpture, the object and everything that it represents is in a whole, "art". When that picture is copied and reproduced from a machine or that sculpture is replicated it loses some of it's artistic appeal. The original objects themselves are "art", because someone created them with their bare hands from their own feelings and emotions. When it is reproduced it loses that, it loses it's aura. The painting or sculpture now embodies the beauty of piece, but loses the human aspect. The aspect that the piece of art was painstakingly created by someone. So the piece itself isn't art anymore, a painting is just a piece of paper, a sculpture is just a chunk of rock; the things and emotions and feelings that the piece of art represents has now become the "art".

It seems that in today's high tech world there are no "original paintings" so to speak. It jumps directly to the reproduction. When a song is recorded onto a computer it has no raw feeling to it. It can be copied countless times without any effort what so ever. So in this digital world art is what the music or video or whatever it may be embodies. The emotions that it is trying to convey to it's audience and the feelings that the maker had when making it. This is why digital things don't have an aura, or at least not nearly as much of one. They don't have the feeling of extraordinary human ability to create such beautiful pieces of art. I'm not saying that they don't have some sense of aura, but not as much as if you were to go to Paris and see the Venus de Milo. You get the sense of emotion and the human aspect of it, the aura.

And with all the technology of today there is question whether some things are art or not. A digital image itself, the bytes saved on a computer or memory card, is not art. If the image was of a lake at sunset; the picture printed out is not art, but the sun and the lake and the trees and the animals and everything together at that very moment is the art. The film or the space on the memory card is just the vessel to hold the art. A photo shopped is not an authentic image. It could be authentic because it is original to some extent. It's the only image of it's kind, but without an entirely separate image it wouldn't even exist. As defined on dictionary.com something authentic is -"not false or copied; genuine; real". The image is copied and not genuine. In terms of many years ago, photo shopping would be as if Vincent Van Gogh were to take the Mona Lisa and alter things slightly and claim it to be a new piece of art. Photo shopping is not an authentic image. Although it is not authentic it may be seen as art to the creator or to other people that see it as having a more than ordinary significance.

2008-03-30T20:59:00.000-07:00

Questions about the internet.

Q: How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?
A: Google ranks websites by how often other sites link to you. Google also uses the relevance of your website to make sure that it is to be included in the list of websites it gives you. The rankings of websites on search engines used to be based on the relevance of your website along with the amount of content on it. So after not to long web designers would put large areas of white text with white background. This would create an illusion to the search engine that there was far more content on the web site than there actually was. Google's way of ranking websites got rid of this and has made Google very popular and effective.

Q: Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?
A: In my opinion I feel that a page's usefulness is based on the source and the amount of material listed. If the source is not good (Wikipedia) then I feel that the page or site is useless. Wikipedia uses information that can be entered by or edited by anyone that feels like they know about the subject. There is a lot of useful factual information Wikipedia but the fact that it can be edited by anyone makes the site, to me, lose it's credibility.
To get to the top of the search engines the page has to be popular among other websites. The more websites that link to it, the higher the ranking will be on the search engine.

Q: What are some of your favorite search engines? Why do you like one more than others?
A: I like Google the most out of any search engine. It has evolved to be tailored to what you need and what you are looking for. It has added separate sections for images, web, maps, and so on. I like it more than others mostly because of habit. It's what I've used for as long as I can remember so as of now it's kind of a natural instinct to go to Google when I need to search for something.

2008-03-30T20:07:00.000-07:00

Internet Scavenger Hunt
10 questions to be found on the internet while not using Google or Wikipedia

1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?
Onel de Guzman
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/29/philippines.lovebug.02/index.html

2. Who invented the paper clip?
William D. Middlebrook
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/paperclip.htm

3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?
It is named after the Ebola River in Zaire, Africa, near where the first outbreak was noted.
http://www.crystalinks.com/ebola.html

4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?
Alaska, United States of America
http://earthquakes.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_great_alaskan_earthquake_1964

5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?
1 Billion kilobytes in a terabyte
http://www.cctsolutions.com/HowManyBytes.htm

6. Who is the creator of email?
Ray Tomlinson
http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html

7. What is the storm worm, and how many computers are infected by it?
A worm/Trojan horse/bot that was hidden in attachments of e-mails; 1 to 50 million Computers are affected by the storm worm.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804528

8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of Australia directly, what is the most efficient way?
With a message form.
http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm

9. Which Brisbane-based punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of?
Black Assassins
https://secure6.ozhosting.com/brisbanewritersfestival/2005/content/standard.asp?name=StockwellS

10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?
After the dot-com crash, the internet was reborn into something better, hence "Web 2.0".
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

2008-03-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

New technologies make it easier than ever to communicate with friends and family. Before the telephone there were very limited ways to communicate between people. Then the invention of the telephone which revolutionized communication. At the time of it's invention, the telephone was an amazing piece of technology. But now there is e-mail, mobile phones, Facebook, MySpace, forums, message boards, online games, and even YouTube. I wonder what Alexander Graham Bell would do if he saw someone walking around talking on a mobile phone or checking there Facebook?

Today my main uses of communication tech are e-mail, my mobile phone, and Facebook. The easiest way to communicate in today's age is the mobile phone. It seems as though everybody and their brother has a mobile phone. Before I left the States I remember seeing kids that couldn't have been older than 10 or 12 and they had their own mobile phone. I don't see what need those kids possessed to own their own mobile phone. None the less, mobile phones seem to have become a necessary part of today's society.

I've had a phone since I was able to drive at 16, and I've been on Facebook for about 2 years now. The phone seemed like a sort of right of passage. I need a phone once I became able to drive so it kind of went hand and hand for me. As far as Facebook goes my friends talked me into getting one. I didn't even want to set it up so I made them do it. Privacy became an issue very quickly when Facebook became popular. A lot of people complained when it was opened up to everyone and not just students at Uni. There has been a lot of changes made since it's start to make every user control the amount of information that he or she wants to divulge to the general public. I really didn't use e-mail until I started Uni about 3 years ago. There really wasn't much need for me to e-mail people, everyone I wanted to talk to I could just call. E-mail isn't the most efficient way to communicate with people and it has it's place but I feel as though it is slowly being phased out by newer, faster, better technologies.

2008-03-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

I'm Mike McCarthy and I am on a study abroad semester here at Griffith University at Gold Coast. I'm originally from Michigan and I have lived there all of my life, and it's very different here than it is in Michigan. When I left Michigan it was about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, that's about -16 degrees Celsius, and when I arrived in Brisbane it was about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, 25 degrees Celsius. I enjoy a lot of snow activities that I am missing out by being here. I left in the middle of the winter so I missed a lot of snowboarding and snowmobiling this snow season, but there will always be next year. I knew that all the stereotypes about Australia were just that, stereotypes, but I can't say I wasn't a little disappointed when I didn't get off the plane to see red deserts and kangaroos.

Uni here is different than back in Michigan. Classes here are two or three hour lectures and tutorials where as in Michigan classes are an hour long every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

It's been a little difficult to adjust to the climate and the classes and minor things like that, but it's been amazing thus far and I'm sure it won't get bad while I'm here.