Computers in Society

No, my parents aren’t on Facebook, nor do I think they ever will be. So let’s leave them out of this.

I recognize the need for parents to monitor their children’s activities, especially when those children are at a point in their lives when they can be emotionally vulnerable to strangers over the internet. However, when those kids are in college, it’s really weird for parents to want to buddy-up with all of their children’s friend on social networking sites. So how about it? How many friend requests have you gotten from your friends’ parents?

Transparency is better than simple honesty, but the combination of the two is even better.

Rather than only revealing selected details, elaborate and clarify. This will help to deter future problems and ill feelings caused by feelings of deception or betrayal. One can too easily interpret the absence of an important detail (which may not be important to another) as the intentional misrepresentation of facts.
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With the advent of digital media, the nation’s copyright and IP system has had difficulties creating valid policies governing these new forms of content. Rather than protecting the rights of the creator and the consumer, the current policy is to protect the business interests of the distributors, effectively stripping previously-held freedoms from those who actually appreciate the value of the content. In order to successfully segue into the digital realm, the United States must promote the legal online distribution of digital content and understand its vital role in marketing and content promotion. The WGA strike spotlighted the failure of the movie and television industry, as well as the WGA itself, to fully comprehend the intricacies of online content, costing the industry billions of dollars.

As internet access becomes available on the devices we use many times throughout the day and becomes increasingly necessary to our productivity and even our social lives, users will no longer be able to practice internet safety by simply limiting their use or avoiding it altogether. Rather, children need to be taught at a young age how to properly and safely take advantage of the resources the internet offers them. They should be educated to distinguish between a profitable online friendship and a dangerous internet match-up. With shows like MSNBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” so much emphasis is placed on the adult counterparts of online relationships that we fail to recognize that such relationships only occur because many children are so naïve as to internet safety procedures. It would be in everyone’s best interest to promote internet safety education in public schools – this is the only way to guarantee that they will be successful as adults in a world that runs on the internet as much as it does Starbucks. (We’ll let their parents address the Starbucks issue.)

Sourceforge is a marvelous junction point for open-source software development. Browsing the hosted projects, however, one quickly becomes aware of some of the weaknesses behind an open development style:

• Bloating - Projects without a firm goal or development plan often grow into an assortment of superfluous modules, plug-ins, themes, add-on, etc., that do little to improve the software itself.
• Staleness - If contributors lose interest in a project, no one is held responsible for maintaining the code or releasing bug patches, leaving those using the software with an inferior product which may have critical security flaws.
• Updates - Unless the software has a built-in update system, early (and late) adopters have no way of knowing that a patch has been released other than manually retrieving the latest revision.
• Quality - With most open-source projects, code contributions come from a variety of users. There is no way of verifying the users’ level of skill or experience, much less detecting any malicious intent. All contributed code should, in theory, be moderated by the project leaders, but this soon becomes impractical for large projects with many lines of code.

During the 19^th century, America established herself as a bastion of innovation, providing useful inventions for the entire world. This surge of creativity continued through the 20^th century, making life easier for everyone in modernized countries. Today, however, we find that while our nation is still spending a great deal of resources on research and development, a decreasing number of our findings are beneficial to emerging countries. While there are obvious exceptions such as AIDS vaccine research and water treatment technologies, many new patents are furthering the gap between first- and third-world countries. Scientists are working on developing CAT7 cable for 10Gbps transmissions over distances greater than 70 meters although much of the planet is still without even the most basic internet access. With this in mind, it is no difficult to understand why we are losing market share. We have begun to focus so much on convenience and ease-of-use, areas of expertise dominated by other countries with much more experience than us. If we wish to re-claim our place in the global marketplace, we need to focus on the billions of people who aren’t at all concerned with download speeds or feature lists. During the current recession, foreign nations are taking advantage of the opportunity to invest in American ingenuity - they know that we’ll eventually fight our way back to the top, and they want to make sure to get a piece of the action when we do. The real question is: how long will it take us before we realize we’re headed in the wrong direction?

Failing to pick up enough delegates to be the Democratic front-runner, Senator Clinton is now attempting to ensure herself a spot on the Democratic ticket should she fail to overtake Senator Obama. Despite the use of negative attack ads which portrayed Sen. Obama as inexperienced and unprepared, the Clinton campaign values Sen. Obama enough to still offer him the Vice-Presidency. Evidently, they feel that by November, he’ll have plenty of experience under his belt. Writes Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News, “It’s a dream team all right, as in dream on. It’s a fantasy because, in the Clintons’ pitch, naturally, she is on top of the ticket and Obama is her No. 2. That’s rich of her, considering that Obama leads in both the delegate race and the popular vote. Forget those pesky voters - Hillary has declared herself the winner!” Many Democratic leaders are discounting the Clintons’ offer, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who stated that the Clintons lost their opportunity when they claimed that Senator McCain was more qualified than Senator Obama. With Michigan and Florida still in limbo, voters may have to wait a long time before a Democratic ticket is resolved.

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Many people have made guesses as to why women seem to avoid the field of computer science. While I am certainly not an expert on the subject — I have conducted no research regarding the matter — I feel I can hypothesize as to why there are so few female students within this particular major. Computer science has a long history of being favored by men with few social skills and fewer personal hygiene habits. Even Bill Gates, one of the most prominent (and wealthiest) computer scientists, is often seen sporting a horrendously awful haircut. Men, in general, have a hard time dressing themselves, and, in general, computer scientists fall far behind the remainder of the male populous. There is also a social taboo surround computer science, one that is equivalent to or worse than that of engineering. If engineers are nerds and social misfits, then computer scientists are the uber-geeks and social lepers of the math and science fields. Women don’t avoid computer science because they’re intimidated by computers. They avoid computer science because they have no desire to associate with the stereotypical computer scientist. And they certainly never want to fit the stereotype themselves.

Thanks to SNL’s skit last Saturday, the debate over fairness in the news media has found a new proponent in Senator Clinton. First of all, let me say that I love SNL, but at the same time, I recognize that it’s a comedy show based in NYC, not a think tank out of Washington. The media does have a responsibility to truthfully report the news, but that duty does not apply in the same way to political coverage. Senator Clinton is not complaining about the lack of coverage that Ralph Nader is receiving, just her own portrayal in the media, indicating that she wants to use the TV networks as scapegoats for her declining position in the polls. While media coverage and poll position are undeniably correlated, Senator Clinton is attempting to reverse the relationship between the two. Her diminishing portrayal by the media outlets is a direct result of her failure to win any of the last 11 primaries. The news outlets just don’t want to make the mistake of backing a loser.

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As cipher and encryption algorithms have developed over the years, the gap between corporate and consumer security has grown increasingly wider. Rather than attributing this deficit to the huge IT budgets allotted by many companies, the gap more closely correlates to the amount of exposure an entity has to external authentication systems. Business users normally require only a small number of authenticated sessions, as modern business networks rely on protocols such as LDAP or Active Directory to link user profiles, email accounts, file permissions, etc. to a single login. Consumer, on the other hand, need separate logins for each email service, blog, forum, or other messaging or subscription service they use. Because no reliable standard for such cross-site authentication exists, the consumer has no way of knowing what degree of security, if any, is in place to protect their personal information. Many sites still store users’ passwords in plaintext, which is an enormous security flaw in and of itself, as the consumer uses the same or a similar password on multiple sites. (This is especially a problem when one of those sites is the service provider of the email account linked to the login.) Until standards such as OpenID are improved and widely implemented, the biggest security risk remains the same services that made modern connectivity so appealing in the first place.

Due to the popularity of their new $60 million shotgun, the US has decided to commence public resale of their newest line of clay pigeons, nicknamed Satellite. Satellite clay pigeons, a favorite among both astrophysicists and Langley guppies, are most noted for their long flight time and their extended visibility range of over five miles. Production has long since ceased on the F-15 skeet, a model which has been criticized by some for its tendency to disintegrate mid-flight. A double-shot version of the F-15 pigeon has demonstrated this flaw, as the pigeons sometime collide in the air. Opponents of the nation’s clay pigeon program have protested the requested billion-dollar budget increase for future product development, leaving many saying “Pull!”

During the last half of the twentieth century, the Church was able to make a great deal of progress in the field of family history. Records which had previously been in books, journals, and logs were transferred to microfilm and later digitized, allowing for multiple people to access the same information simultaneously. With the advent of the Internet, that same access was expanded to users globally, permitting anyone to browse the Church’s huge database. Despite all of our technological advances, family history work will encounter an eventual dead-end as we reach the historical bounds of written records. We can continue analyzing and extracting information from the records we already possess, but unless someone stumble across a time machine, we’ll just have to be content will the billions of records we already have.

Over the past few decades, new technologies have allowed the Church to leave behind it shell of isolationism and emerge as a viable international entity. Through radio and television broadcasts and various web sites such as lds.org and mormon.org, the Church is slowly depolarizing the general populous and disproving common misconceptions regarding our religion. Leaders’ appearances on syndicated shows have permitted viewers to determine for themselves the nature of our devotion, as demonstrated by the late President Hinckley. The public image of the Church outside of the US, where negative stereotypes are much stronger, has greatly benefitted from increased media coverage. Internally, these same technologies have standardized learning and training within the Church. Units throughout the world are now able to operate with the same level of leadership, independent of their location or language. In short, technology has helped the Church evolve into an organization ready for growth in the coming decades.

In order to be a (stylistically) successful writer, one must learn to achieve the proper separation between one’s own thoughts and the words on the page. If one is too deep in meditation, the writing will become halting and scattered, a tribute to the brain’s ability to link many unique, complex ideas on the fly. Yet if one concentrates too much on the writing, the sentences will flow easily, but lead to nowhere in particular. Throughout history, the great writers of the ages have been those who were able to master this balance without external influence, bending the language to meet their needs and whims. For the rest of us, however, grammar was invented, to temper our flood of thoughts and allow us to carefully construct them, piece by piece, into an intelligible entity.

This past week, the FDA announced that they were approving the sale of meat and dairy products from cloned animals. This news has sat on the sidelines because of more critical issues such as the presidential primaries and the current economic downtrend, but food critics and connoisseurs have not been so silent. They are concerned that by allowing cloned animal products onto the market, a great deal of diversity will be permanently lost. There will no longer be an element of surprise when biting into a particularly succulent cut of tenderloin, they claim, as one will already know exactly what quality of meat to expect from each cloned animal. While the variability of meat and dairy products will certainly decrease, the variety of such foodstuffs will not. Retailers and consumers will be able to order exactly the type of meat they desire, giving rise to a new type of livestock diversity based on consumer demand rather than the whims of nature. Wealthy connoisseurs will be able to customize each animal to fit their appetite. They’ll just have to wait a few years for their order to arrive.

It’s been interesting to observe how the public’s opinion of technology, particularly computers, has changed over the past ten years. Those who once bemoaned technology as the downfall of society now rely on it for their daily activities, whether by choice or by obligation. Today, no one complains of the availability of broadband internet in the home or mobile phone coverage along a stretch of remote highway. Now, the public’s battle is with those who provide specific services that are deemed immoral or overpriced. Having lost the fight against the advent of new technologies, we embrace these conveniences and continue on to other issues. We prefer to contend with service providers rather than confront our own inability to properly manage our time. Perhaps it is not technology, nor the ethical and moral questions it presents, that irritates us so, but the sudden recognition that we are not as civilized and developed as we once supposed.