Blog 5

Tutorial Task: Wikipedia

Article 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biloela

This article on my home town ‘Biloela’, is surprisingly accurate. It highlights the geographical location of the town, the industry which the town thrives on, local facilities and other interesting aspects of the town. It covers all basic facts which a reader would need to understand the topic. The article is a little biased, as it kind of sounds like a article you would find in a travel brochure promoting the town. In my opinion, Biloela is not that great of a town. I was born and bred there and couldn’t wait for the day I moved to the Gold Coast. But that is my opinion. Maybe to improve the article I would write from a local’s perspective what it was like growing up in the town. This would give a little more of an insight to what it’s like to live there, not just as a tourist destination.


Article 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optus

This article on Optus only covers the very basic facts about the company. From what I know from working for the company the article is accurate. It highlights the important aspects of the company which would be a useful start to someone who is researching Optus. The article is very balanced and fair as it only states the very fundamental facts about the company. No biased opinion is prominent in the article. I would not make any changes to this article as I believe it does not need any more information. A researcher can go to the Official Optus webpage for further information.


Lecture Notes:


Birth of the Computer
Charles Babbage created the first Mechanical computer; he sketched out the logical structure of the modern computer.

Computers were first commercially produced by IBM in the 1950s. The first generation of computers were large, unwieldy and expensive machines for military, government and corporate work but it quickly became apparent that computers would get smaller, quicker and less expensive at an exponential rate

Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC is known for making the personal computers of today possible and approachable by the general user. In the early 70’s they developed concepts such as the mouse, the graphical ser interface (GUI) and pull down menus.

Apple
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
They produced the Apple I - a primitive machine with a single circuit board, no case and no keyboard. It sold for $USA666.60

PC/Microsoft
Bill Gates wrote a language called BASIC for the Altair, so that it could be used for simple applications like word processing, basic accounting and some games. In order to market his program he started a little company in his garage - Microsoft. By the end of 1975 more companies had joined the PC industry.

The internet
The internet is a network of networks, which is often called ‘Internetwork’. It uses servers to run everything. There are only seven serves in the world which controls all the information.

World Wide Web
It is important to understand that the internet is not the same thing as the web.
The web is an application of the Internet which began in the 1990’s. The Web includes all the internet sites that people have made available on servers around the world. The web is just one part of the broader internet which includes many other things as well as the Web

Cyberspace
A conceptual space where words, relationships, data, wealth and power are manifested by people using Computer Mediated Communication technologies.

Some early Internet Applications:

• Electronic mail (Email)
  Email is a virtual mail system which sends documents from one sender to either one or multiple receivers.
  
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
  File Transfer Protocol is a system which allows you to directly download (or upload) files from another computer onto your computer with minimal requirements for compatibility.
  
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
  IRC is a real time chat system that was particularly popular in the 1990s as it was one of the first applications that allowed people to type to each other in real time. This is what is known as a “Synchronous” medium of communication.
  
• MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, etc.
  These are all variants on the same kind of program usually referred to as MUDs (which originally stood for Multiple User Dungeon because it was based on Dungeons and Dragons. These were the first of the internet massive multiuser online role playing games. Rather than being graphics-based, MUDs are text only.

More Recent Internet Applications:

• Instant Messaging (IM)
• Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharing
• Portable Audio (MP3s, AAC, FLAC, OGG, etc) and Podcasting
• VoIP and Voice chat

Blog 4

Week 5 already, time is going fast. Our lecture this week was mostly about negative and positive aspects of Wikipedia. The overall sense was that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially for academic research. It is more of a cultural source for diverse theories and opinions. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at anytime. So how do we know what is truth? In the lecture notes, there were some theories that can help determine the truth:

Correspondence Theory: Just the facts - observable, measurable
Coherence Theory: Does it fit together and make sense?
Performative Theory: I do declareSocial Theory: What can we agree on?

We also looked into some of the aspects of the movie Matrix, which gave us a glimpse into the future of technology.

The reading for this week was a short story based in the 1940's and was set seven years into the future. I found it quite complex to comprehend. The lecture notes stated that the Wikipedia article for this story was 'pretty good' so I went to the Wikipedia site for an overview of the story. I guess it relates to this weeks topic of 'Wikipedia', as the story is about an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country, that is imagined by people and thereby created. It reflects our study of Wikipedia and the search for truth.

In our tutorial we shared our individual interpretation of the lecture and discussed our ideas for our essay topics. My essay topic is: Do virtual environments emulate or mimic the real world and the everyday lives of real people?

For our tutorial task, we were asked to consider the following questions:

How do the ideas from Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" apply to contemporary digital media?
Walter Benjamin explains that Mass production enables all people to view digital movies and not just the elite sort. This type of production is much better suited to today’s society.

There was a time when "Art" was made by artists who were skilled professionals. Now that anyone with a computer can create things digitally (music, images, videos, etc), what does that mean for "art"?
In todays society art is not just a painting or drawing on a canvas. Art is used to express emotions and creativity in what ever shape or form. For example, an Apple turning brown once its been cut open could be seen as art. Just like most things in life, art has evolved overtime.

Is a photoshopped image "authentic"?
No, authentic means real, genuine, true relaible. Would you call a photoshopped image of a super modle real, genuine, true or relaible? No, I wouldnt. These images are not real people, they are digitialy inhanced to create the ideal or perfect person. When in relaity people dont look like that. So no, I do not belive a photoshopped image is authentic and I would like to meet someone who thought they were authentic.

Do digital "things" have an "aura" (in Benjamin's terms)?

Media such as music, images and video are a form of art which is expressed by mass media. The “aura” refers to people’s sense of awe they have to these such productions. These digital medias provoke feelings and opinions, and so are considered to have an aura.

Blog 3

Welcome back; hope you all had a nice break. We kicked of week 4 with a lecture on old communication technologies. Why learn about old communication technologies in a new communication technologies course you might wonder? Well there are many reasons why we should study the history of communication technologies. We look at how these technologies have evolved over time and what factors have influenced these changes. Also, studying old technologies helps us understand new communication technologies today. We touched on the history of communication equipment such as, the telegraph, morse code, phonograph, radio, telephone and television.

Also in the lecture we looked at theories over time dating back from the 1920’s. We had an extended reading on Walter Benjamin, who has been influential in the fields of cultural studies and media theory. We also briefed on 'Semiotics'. Which from my understanding is a theory about signs and how they are apart of social life. Elements of a Semiotic approach is the relationship between signs to what they stand for, the formal or structural relations between signs and the relation of signs to interpreters.

In our tuorial we discussed the lecture material and what we learnt from the content. It was good to hear other students ideas and thoughts, becuase there was somthings they spoke about that I did not pick up in the lecture. We also discussed our essays and we are expected to have an essay topic in mind by our next tute.

Our tutorial task for this week was to answer the following questions using an internet based search engine other than the favourite 'Google'.

1. Who was the creator of the infamous "lovebug" computer virus?

Answer: Onel de Guzman, 24, at computer school

Source: studenthttp://archives.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/29/philippines.lovebug.02/index.html

2. Who invented the paper clip?

Answer: Erlman J. Wright invented the first official paperclip.

Source: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/121017http://www.answerbag.com

3. How did the Ebola virus get its name?

Answer: It takes its name from the Ebola River in northern Congo (Zaire.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/ebola?cat=health

4. What country had the largest recorded earthquake?

Answer: The largest recorded earthquake was in Chile.

Source: earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/kids/facts.phphttp://www.yahoo.com.au

5. In computer memory/storage terms, how many kilobytes in a terabyte?

Answer: 1 terabyte = 1 073 741 824 kilobytes

Source: www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/ - 43k

6. Who is the creator of email?

I found alot of conflicting answer to this question. So I could not just state one, as I do not know which one is correst.

7. What is the storm worm, and how many computers are infected by it?

Answer: It is one of the largest and most sophisticated cyber fraud networks ever constructed and it has affected close to 10 million computers.

Source:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/10/the_storm_worm_maelstrom_or_te.html?nav=rss_blog

8. If you wanted to contact the prime minister of australia directly, what is the most efficient way?

Answer: To contact the Prime Minister it must be done through the Australian Government website.

Source: http://www.australia.gov.au/

9. Which Brisbane-based punk band is Stephen Stockwell (Head of the School of Arts) a member of?

Answer: Stephen played in the Black Assassins.

Source: http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/staff/stockwell.htm

10. What does the term "Web 2.0" mean in your own words?

Answer: Web 2.0 is a term used to refer to the next generation of the internet. It is concerns a more user-based internet, that conects people.

Source: internet.http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

To achieve my answers I used a couple different sources such as dogpile.com and yahoo.com. I found that Google is more specific in its findings than other search engines. I had to filter through a few different web pages to get the answer I was looking for. I think I will stick to Google when looking for information. It saves me time!