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?