TED and Stumble

I have had the stumbleupon toolbar for a couple of years now.  I really like having it because I can set it to my interests and it's awesome to use when there's nothing to do and facebook hasnt updated.

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David Bismark: E-voting without fraud 

The purpose of this video is to explain a different way of voting so that there can't be any cheating by people during the process.  What I found most interesting is the whole new idea of how to vote.  David proposed making it electronic so that there is a barcode and each candidate is written in a different order so no one knows who you voted for.  After scanning the barcode you can take it home and use it as a receipt to make sure your vote counted. I saw no problems with this idea, I think it would be beneficial.

Thomas Thwaites: How I built a toaster -- from scratch 

In this video, Thomas Thwaites described how much effort it takes from society to be able to build just one toaster.  He went on a journey to get iron from a mine to literally make steel, caves to get copper from water, and chipped mica off of a mountain.  He also made his own plastic and molding of a toaster.  This is a good idea because it puts into prospective how much work it takes to build something as simple as a toaster. Overall his ending product of a homemade toaster was pretty impressive.

Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots

The final video I looked at was about adding robots to everyday life.  I thought it was interesting how they added a robot to simple things, such as talking on the phone.  They suggested while talking on the phone putting it on a robot that moved so it was more interactive. I think the down point about this is that we are already too dependent on technology, so by adding it to little things makes it too much.

Outer Space

For my blog entry I decided to look at Flickr since I have never been on it before.  After exploring the website for a few minutes I came across a blog type page for NASA where they post pictures and videos from space.  I thought this was really interesting because some of them are real pictures and videos from the satellites in space.  The purpose of their page is to update everyone on either weather patterns or just what is going on in outer space in general.  The most interesting picture and explanation I found was a tropical cyclone that happened in Madagascar on February 14th this year. They said wind gusts got up to 105 mph and the storm was expected to come back through after passing because of high sea surface temperatures.  I look through many of the articles and pictures because it was so cool to see pictures from space since we only get to see computer animated ones on tv.

Text Messaging Saves Lives

One of the categories I decided to look at was interesting news stories. There are blogs that are on news sites which allow people to comment and talk about articles. The reason why I decided to pick this topic is because I don't really watch the news while I'm at school, so I thought it would be good to look through them and post some that I found interesting for others to read and comment on too.

After looking through different websites/blogs for news articles I found ABC news to have the most organized articles http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Blogs/ .  After looking through the articles I found this one to be the most interesting http://blogs.abcnews.com/hearsay/2010/06/text-message-sent-before-murdersuicide.html .  With the use of social media, a text was sent to the childrens' babysitter to get them out of the house before the father killed the mother.  I thought this was interesting because people are always talking about how bad we as a society have become with all of this technology and text messaging.  If you look at this story it actually shows how important of a role technology played and saved the lives of 2 innocent children.

The purpose of this is to show that social media isn't always a bad thing. I think it is more directed to older people to read because it allows them to understand that not all technology causes bad things to happen and it can actually save lives.

Me

My name is Chelsea Boisvert and I am a junior at Southern New Hampshire Unviersity. My major is Forensic Psychology, but I'm not sure what I want to do with it yet.  I've lived in New Hampshire my whole life.  I took this class as an elective, but I am interested in social media, because it surrounds us everywhere. I wasn't introduced to the internet or computers until I was in third grade, but ever since then techonology has been, what seems like, the only way to communicate with people.  It's interesting how many different things a person can be a part of on the internet to communicate with people who are similar to them.