The Next New Thing

I guess most of you had experience of borrowing textbooks and making copies from them in school library.  Since school only has a few copies of each textbook, if other students borrowed them out, you might need to wait until they returned the book. If school has all the textbooks in E-book version, then we can borrow them anytime while school library is opened. That sounds convenient for everyone of us because we do not need to wait at the long line or afraid of the book is out. Another advantage for E-book is that we do not need waste time on flipping over the book page by page while making copies. We can just print the pages we want from the computer.

In order to prevent violating the intellectual property, every student should have their log on to borrow the E-books. When the two hours time limit is over, the E-book should not be available for the borrower. Also, E-book can only read in school's computer and can not be save as a file. If our school library has this option for student, we can save a lot of time on waiting and copying the textbooks. Especially some professors only use partial of the textbook, no one would like to spend extra money on expensive books. School should consider this option for us.

Our Class Wiki - So Far

In our class wiki, I chose to contribute on New Media in Healthcare with an interesting topic – Weight Loss. Maintaining a good weight is very important because that means a lot to our health. Over weighted people tend to easier to get obesity and diabetes. Therefore, we need to keep fit in order to be healthy. Many people are serious about it. The best and healthiest way to lose weight is to eat right and do exercises. How do new media help us to maintain a healthy weight? It is easy, by a calorie calculator.

People used to calculate calories by writing down what they eat for each supper and follow the nutrition label to see how many calories they had. For exercise, people record how long did they work then calculate how many calories they have burned. Those are old ways to might not be as accurate as we use a calorie calculator.  It has most of the foods and exercise in the system. When you enter any foods in, the calories will show up on the calculator. On the other hand, when you input an exercise, it is a negative number appear as how many calories did you burn through that exercise. Isn’t that convenient compare to those old ways? I am going to do more research on this topic and share some interesting thing about New Media in Healthcare.  

However, I did not contribute anything from my project to wiki. My topic was E-book and I got so much information about it. I think I should start to work on that, too.

About my term paper

For my term research paper I chose the topic of Books Versus E-books. We as students have to interact with books everyday. Traditional books are bulky and heavy, E-books as a new media resolved that problem. That was the main reason I chose this topic. As I did my research I learned a lot about both books and e-books. Books were used to record data and most of these information will pass down for generations. With the new media of e-books, we are able to store these data in a digital form. Before I started my research I was more bias towards e-books. After the research I learned that books and e-books have their unique identities.
E-book as a new media enabled people to do things in a different way. E-books also changed how libraries operate. The invention of e-books technologically helped our society leap a big step, however e-books can not entirely replace traditional books.

My technique for this research paper was first to find as much information as I can. After that I organized these data and start my outline. As I was doing my outline I added notes of what citation I should be using in each part of the essay. After I finish my outline I reviewed the outline to make sure the sequence of the outline makes sense. Finally I started writing my research paper base on the sequence I did on my outline.

Extra Credit: "The Social Network"

Before I watched the movie "The Social Network", I thought it must be so boring based on its title. I did some research online and came out with a surprising result. The rating of the movie by the critics on Yahoo is an A, which is an interesting movie to watch. Therefore, I decided to go to watch this movie and it did not disappointed me at all.

Mark Zuckerberg is the main character in the movie and he is a genius computer programing student in Harvard University. At the beginning of the movie, Mark broke up with his girlfriend and he was so upset about it. So he released his anger by creating a website (www.facemash.com) and putting all girls' image there for others to compare who is the better looking one between the two. Students started rating on that website and it became famous in just a very short period of time. However, this website seemed like violating others' privacy and intellectual property.  Later on, Mark came up with an idea of making a website for people to connect each other inside of their social network by voluntarily providing self information and inviting friends to join, which is known as facebook. The website was first for Harvard students only then expanded to other college students as well. Mark's intention to the website was not for profit. Instead, he motivation is to make facebook the most famous social networking site.

"The Social Network" is a movie involving love, friendship, and money. Even though Mark became the youngest billionaire in history, but he lost his lover and friends. In my opinion, I think the ending of the movie is kind of sad. Mark has money, but he is lonely. He does not have anyone to share his happiness with. Maybe Mark is a genius about computer programming, but he is not good at relationship and friendship. Money is not everything in our life; it can not buy real friends and true love.

Privacy & Confidentiality

The social networking sites are the places where people can discover others' privacy. For example, many people are big fans of facebook. They like to post pictures, update status and make new friends through facebook. By doing so, do you know that you are displaying your privacy to other people? Even thought some people might already setup the privacy protection like only friends are allowed to read what you post, but there are still some risks. In your friends' list, there might be some people you do not know very well or just know them by faces. They can get your information from your facebook like where do you go to school, where do you live and when is your birthday. In my opinion, birthday is a very important privacy information and therefore, I suggest people should not to post it on their facebook or any social networking page. Many security questions must contain a question related to your date of birth. Also, many people setup their password like a combination of their birthday and your name, is that true for you? If yes, then more likely than not, people can access to any of your accounts easily by guessing your password. On the other hand, there is a "check me in" function on facebook where people can share where they are and what they are doing to their friends. This app might be fun to share some good stuffs with friends, but it is also dangerous to do so. Why? When some people know that you are not home, some of your "bad friends" can do anything that you can't imagine. Therefore, having the security protection on your social network is not enough. You must know what you can share and what you can not. Privacy is not easy to protect, so everyone must be careful when you launch to any social network.

Besides social networking sites, e-commerce also gives us a big headache on our privacy and confidential protection. When you make a purchase online, you must enter some of your personal information like e-mail, phone number, credit card information and home address. Some credit card information might get stolen from the web that way. I had personal experience about that. Someone used my credit card purchased a few hundreds merchandise. It took me two months to get those money disputed. However, it did not stop me to shop online because it is really convenient to do so (save time and energy). But I would choose some websites with a security logos on the page in order to lower my risk. On the other hand, every website would have a database about you once you make a purchase from there, such as what size you are wearing, your sex, your age, your favorite colors and etc. Next time when you go back to their site, they can post some items that you might interested on the first page. But if it is not your personal computer, it takes even longer to find what you want to buy. Also, the seller can sell their customers' database to other vendors so the vendors can send you e-mails or spams and advertise their products. Those kind of information should be confidential and not to be shared with others. Next time when you need to make a purchase online, make sure you check the "opt out" box of junk mail and things like that.

Privacy and confidentiality is a big issue on the Internet. People have to be careful about sharing their personal information on the web. Hopefully, we will have some better ways to solve this problem.

Advise to Baruch College

As everyone knows, Baruch College is a top rank college in the United States. There are many people from other places want to know more about our college. Even though we already have our school website, but I think it is not enough for others to know more about our college. If they are interested and wanted to transfer to our college, they might want to see how the campus looks like, how people behave and what the comments are about the school. Our official website does not provide enough information like that. If we have a website can tell the transfer students more about our college, that would be more convenient. People can ask basic questions, leave comments and post news about our school. Every student and faculty have his/her own login names and guess would have his/hers as well. That way, people can communicate from different places through the website. People can also make friends from our school's  website.

When people complete the transfer to our college, they would not afraid of the new environment in our college because they already got some useful information from current students. I was a transferred student and I was nervous when I came to this school. I did not know anything about the school, like where is the classrooms, cafeteria, bookstore and all that. If we have a website for students to interact each other, that would be great. We can share some secrets about the school like where we can find the best food or a quiet place to study during club hours. Isn't it fun?

On the other hand, almost everyone is holding a cell phone. I think we can contact our professors and classmates not only by e-mail, but also by SMS. We can log on to the Internet with WiFi and send messages for free using our cell phones. Many people do not use school e-mail or always for get to check it. Therefore, they always miss some important announcements. Baruch College is always overwhelming by students everywhere. Sometimes you can't even find a seat in the afternoon or during final week. If we can't get a computer to use, there is no way to access our e-mail. So, we can get our first hand information through a text message, I think it would be a better and easier tool than e-mail.

Hopefully, a digital notebook will be available for professors and students soon. So we do not need to bring all the physical books with a heavy book bag to school. All the study materials are stored to our digital notebook and we can write our notes on the digital notebook. We can save papers and ink. Professors also can connect their digital notebooks to the computer and give out notes that way, so we do not have problems seeing some professor's difficult and unreadable handwriting. I think it is a little bit too expensive to do so now. Eventually, as the technologies are improving, the new media is going to replace the old media soon (It might not be completely, but it should be a in big range).