Information wants to be free

After reading Professor Burton's blog post on the differences between classic capitalism and the new digital capitalism one phrase remained with me: "information wants to be free" so i followed the link to learn more. I thought at first of the philosophical implications of such a statement. of how century after century the human mind has been yearning for greater and greater knowledge and how it is our destiny to continue to build on the foundation of knowledge that was painstakingly laid by those who went before us. but the article gave me a different perspective than i was expecting. 

Midterm Reflection

If you had asked me five weeks ago what I thought of blogs I would have responded by saying something like I think they are for teenage girls or for middle aged women who need something to do while their kids are away at school for the day. However as I have taken this class my opinion on blogging and numerous other methods of communication (including facebook) have dramatically changed. After 13 or more years of conventional education I have been conditioned to see certain avenues of obtaining knowledge as taboo or off limits, specifically those on the Internet. However this class has flipped my understanding of seeking greater understanding on its head.

Digital Literacy contiued...still music

I just finished my getting my sound cloud membership up and running and afterward i posted an original song by my roommate from a couple years ago that i recorded and mixed using Garage Band. now that it is on soundcloud people can find, comment on, and download this song of ours. and i can track the number of views and downloads. i am very excited. this makes getting my personal artistic talent out there so easy. i guess you could say it makes 'connecting' very convenient.
A Friend (Ft. Jake Corkin) by 720 Media

Digital literacy: Sound Cloud

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

So i just told you all about the song i recorded on garage band. the next step in my creative process is to share it. so i checked out sound cloud which makes it really easy to download and share music via social networking all over the web.
i can receive music and dont have to go through the big hassle of waiting for downloading and all that.

The limits of geometry

The topic that i chose to study a little about in the encyclopedia was mathematics. the reason is i have always loved math and i am currently taking two economics classes that are heavy on the math, one in calculus and one in statistics. So I looked at all four of the entries under Mathematics and found the most interesting one to be about limits. Limits for those of you who dont know are used in calculus and it is defined as x+h as h approaches some defined number or line or plane. this all i knew, but what i thought was really cool was that the entry taught me that the principles of the limit are "used as principles to show rigorously that the area of a circle, is the product of its semicircumference by its radius." i have always just taken that equation for granted and never really stopped to see where it came from. but now i think: 'of course it comes by using limits, duh!'. it is cool when things you learned a long time ago and things you are learning come together like that. this was a simple epiphany that has relatively little importance however i still thought i would share it. 

Rene Descartes walks into a restaurant. The waiter asks: Will you be having the paper today, sir?. Rene Descartes replies: I think not. And disappears.

I hope you enjoyed that joke. But seriously i saw that descartes was the only one in the people to know without any papers or materials to study so i looked for some info on him. I used Dr. Burton's suggestions in his blog to use other methods of searching. there are a lot of suggestions the one i focused on today was using the google blog searcher. Here are my simple findings on Rene Descartes:

Open government

After reading the wikipedia entry on open government i was interested to learn more about one of these organizations that is fighting for governments to turn away from secrecy. So i went to Transparency International's official site. I learned a lot about this organization. Transparency international's goal is to "to create change towards a world free of corruption". It lists ways i never even thought of that corruption can sneak into the public and private sector. TI has been very successful since its formation in 1993. Among others, a significant accomplishment of TI is found in this statement from their website: "prior to 1996, the World Bank did not explicitly discuss corruption. Today, the Bank considers it the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development." but this begs the question: How are you fighting corruption?

Free Software

When professor Zappala presented the information on the free software movement i was very perplexed about the economics of the whole thing. so i found this article on written by Benjamin Hak-Fung Chiao of New York University. He sustains much of what Dr. Zappala was teaching and gave me a little more insight into the whole economic side of the story.

Remember, Remember

I was reading Chase's blog "Chasing Knowledge" and it reminded me of a wonderful mormon message that i love. It is by president Eyring and he talks about the importance of remembering and he mentions his habit of writing in his journal. we have been talking about the importance of recording and sharing information in society and culture as a whole. and i think it is crucial that we remember the importance of recording and sharing our own experiences i.e. in our journals.

What I learned from my group: Screencasting

I like my group-mate, Kristi, have never heard of Screencasting before. i went to the website she suggested, Jing, and watched the tutorial video. Screencasting allows me to show another individual online things on my computer screen. it could be images, or movies and i can share it on the web. this makes online collaboration even easier. at first i thought i wouldnt really ever use this feature, however i think that in certain study groups this could be very useful. including in this class. What i think is most interesting is Mac has had this technology for a while now. if two people both have macs one can actually take over the whole screen of the other and thereby making collaboration much easier.

Owl city and the impact of metadata

This is Owl City. it is the brainchild of Adam Young. i thought of this artist when professor burton talked to us about the importance of the invention of the MP3 format. An insomniac, Adam young started recording music in his basement to fill his nights. he downloaded them to myspace.com and became so popular online that universal records picked him up. and a couple of his songs have since been chart-toppers. this is so cool to me. that no longer do artists wait for their "big break" but can be much more proactive. they can use the progression of data and technology formats to express themselves to a large audience. and Owl city is not the only band to do this. Maybe my blog will get me a big deal with a publishing company...

Google dominating the world

i am listening to pandora.com internet radio and i am noticing that it already has my facebook linked to my pandora account and i never did that. furthermore i noticed when commenting for the first time on someone's blog i could just say use my google account for it and it knew all sorts of stuff about me. and my google account is connected to pandora, facebook, blogspot, ichat, everything. it is all becoming so uniform and connected on the web. it is really convenient. i just like seeing the progression of online tools even now after i thought things like google could not evolve anymore.

Search engines, the new frontier

So i was given the task of better understanding "searching" on the internet. and given that i do not use anything but google i found myself typing in google "search engines". the irony of searching for another search engine on google made me laugh. but i found that for basic searching google, bing, altavista, dogpile, etc. are all more or less the same. the only difference was the visuals. i personally preferred bing and google the most. however i found a delightfully fun search source: Idee Labs.

Words, words, words

So i have titled my entry words words words because i figured shakespeare fits right into the time frame we are studying in this class. and because, words are what made shakespeare famous. my sister is brand new on campus and she wrote a wonderful note on facebook that i loved. so i thought that it would be fun to use her words that she used to express herself and let her see them expressed in a different way. thanks "Dare Me" for the post on your blog. and thanks Averill for your note. who knows, you could be the next shakespeare. love you.

The biggest copyright infringement in history

I found this article online that spurred my interest in what may be the be the biggest copyright infringement in the history of the world. http://www.computersmiths.com/chineseinvention/blockprint.htm. The Gutenberg press, invented in 1450 AD, is considered by many historians to be the most important invention of world civilization.
However i would like to just point out that perhaps their should be another recipient of such a great honor.

Worlds without end

I loved reading Pico Della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. The reason being, I just returned from my mission and therefore I see connections to the Restored Gospel and almost everything else in the world. But Mirandola's oration made it too easy. but the ease with with his philosophy and my religious theology meshed really put my soul in a comfortable place.

We are no longer the center of the universe

After reading a little about Ptolemy's and Copernicus's contributions to our now modern view of astronomy, I thought immediately about the affect that had on the enthusiastic supporters of Aristotle's theories on the make-up of the universe. Can you imagine what is would be like to hear for the first time that we, God's creation, are not the center of it all? keep in mind that this is challenging hundreds of years of tradition and one of the greatest thinkers this earth has ever known.

But what a change that must have made to society and culture. I then thought of a more recent advancement in technology and its affect on society and culture. That advancement i am referring to is of course the internet. I stumbled upon a book called "Free Culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture..." by Lawrence Lessig. In the first few pages he makes an interesting point. It was said that the internet doesn't affect those off-line; that one could escape by just turning off one's modem. But Lessig argues that the battles of the Internet now affect the live's of those on and offline alike.