Our Class Wiki - So Far

The first 4 rounds of the South American World Cup Qualifiers has just recently passed. I am still researching on the 16 games that took place and will post the details in the sports section of the Class wiki.

P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the act of sending any file over any network from one computer to the other, In a sense creating multiple copies of it distributed to the user that demand it. P2P File sharing is an advancement on File Sharing on a larger scale. P2P file sharing works by a system of Seeders and Leechers. The Seeder is the user that uploads the file, while the leecher, downloads the file. The way P2P file sharing works (particularly on BitTorrent) is by cutting up the file into multiple pieces. The Seeder then uploads the files to the leecher that is downloading it. Once the Leecher has the file, he automatically becomes a seeder of that piece and uploads it to anyone else that wants to download the file. If there are multiple seeders, the download speed can be significantly faster. Clive Thompson interviewed Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent. He explains the nature of BitTorrent and how it literally changed the way people watch TV. He called it the worlds largest TiVo since users are now able to download their show at amazing speeds when they miss it simply by searching it on a torrent.

Privacy & Confidentiality

I actually spent a great deal of time writing a paper for this class on this topic. The main issues with privacy these days are confidentiality, reliability and vulnerability. How confident can you be that the information you post will not leak to someone that you didn't intend it to. How reliable is the information that is posted up? looking at a screen is different from actually looking at the person face to face. For all we know the information could have come from a 5 - year old, rather than the 30 - year old they claim to be. Vulnerability because any information that is posted is in a sense public. How willing is a person to share information with someone else?

Advice to Baruch College

Since New Media has become a dominant factor in the world today, I personally I would suggest some of the textbooks to turn into e-books. Of course the option should remain to buy the physical copy of the book, but an e-book would greatly be useful. A second thing would be to have group pages for the class on Facebook, administered by the professor (this would eliminate any cheating on the group page). This way a student can conduct a forum in which the professor and their classmates can participate in.

Creativity and New Media

This was a Salsa skit that a couple of my classmates and I performed after rehearsing only 1 hour prior to actually performing. By the way, this is in Baruch...

Creativity

There is no doubt that these days, any type of Media has been recorded to digital format. Digital format is the representation of bits in the form of 1's and 0's and depending on the fragmentation can be interpreted by many different representations of itself. It is due to this that "mashups" are so easily created. This is why programs like Photoshop can take any picture and completely customize the picture to have anything the user wishes to put on it. It's how video and music editing software works. This allows the user to have this new sense of "Creation". In the music world, they would call this a "remix". Associating the old with the new to create something that's neither, but simply an expression of the users creativity. According to Brook Barnes from New Times, "Mashups" have been recognized as fair use of copyrighted material. Companies like Nickelodeon even offered praise to certain users whose "mashups" were exceptionally good. Even Disney, who has always held strict policies on their characters has allowed the use of their characters to be remixed with "Crank That" by Soulja Boy.

Blog about Twitter

Twitter is a back and forth conversation website. Like i said in my previous blog, Twittering can take at a minimum 5 seconds to post anything, A phrase, a quote, an emotion, an action, even a word. The fact is that Twitter accepts anything. If twittering can take 5 seconds then replying can be just as fast and with mobile apps and WiFi nearly everywhere. It can literally take 5 minutes to have a full blown discussion. Similar to a discussion on blackboard but probably faster. Granted emotions are hard to display without facial or bodily expressions, but that's what smileys are for ^_^ A class discussion would probably be more effective in that you can actually see the person. But its limited to how many people can participate in the discussion. Rather a twitter discussion can even involve a third party from the other side of the globe.