For the practicum for week 8, creating a google chart using historical data. I decided to created a chart showing the states with the highest Asian-American Demographic in the United States in 2011. At first, I didn’t know which chart to use, but I felt that the circle chart would best reveal the data in the clearest way. I went on Wikipedia to research the data on the demographics and calculated the top four states with the most Asians present. I could of used more states or all 50 states, but I felt like that would be too much and excessive so I just narrowed it down to the top four. As you can see, Hawaii’s population of Asian’s is enormous. That obviously has contributed to it’s proximity to Asian itself. The same goes for California.

So when doing some research on Nicholas Felton, it is quite amazing what he has accomplished off of something that can easily be so simplistic. By recording something as basic as his yearly activities, he has done so in a way and style that is truly original. His creativity has even landed him publications in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Good Magazine; and has been recognized as one of the 50 most influential designers in America by Fast Company AND has been credited for creating facebook’s new timeline format that is seen by millions today. But what is it about his reports about his yearly activities that has landed as such a credited designer?… Well at first, I didn’t think they would be THAT  intricate, but then I investigated a little bit further..

For example, he starts at 2005 up to the most recent report in 2011. And the differences in intricacy are undeniable. In fact, they have become almost unreadable. To elaborate, here is a report from calculating where he’s traveled in the year of 2005:

As you can see, it’s pretty straight forward, but still thorough. He shows where he has traveled abroad, where he’s traveled in the United States, the amount of flights, the average distance, air miles traveled, and what percentage that would equate to in relation to the distance from the earth to the moon to give you a good sense of how far he’s gone. The categories are separated in four readable squares to properly organize them, accompanied with an image of several tall buildings to make it ecstatically pleasing. In my opinion, this is a very good report. It’s not more than it needs to be, but all the elements to make it effective and impressive are still there.

Now in contrast, here is The Felton Report of the same situation (travel) but in 2011:

As you can see, the difference from the 2005 travel report could not be more different. For me, it is almost unreadable. For example, the writing is too small to read, there is just too much detail for me to even want to stay focused, I don’t know the purpose of he specific illustrations, and I don’t understand the purpose for the placing. The way the images overlap for New York specifically is just unreadable and exhausting. You really have to go out of your way to try to truly understand this particular report and I doubt many people really care to.

I don’t know if this means his life has become extremely intricate and more exciting in the past 6 years, but I doubt it. It is almost as if throughout the years he is attempting to prove how precise he can be. However, if everyone is too confused to even care to understand it then what’s the point. It’s as if he is just trying to show off at this point. When I first looked at these reports, I thought they were for some huge corporation or something involving business, because I didn’t really care to look further. But when I did, and realized it was just about his life activities, I got the impression that the whole thing is kind of a lot. Each year, it seems like he must top himself in detail to prove his improvement and credibility. But who knows, maybe people really like that..

So I downloaded Google Earth and decided to use the map of Paris. I was going to use my hometown, Jupiter Florida, but realized that the maps in Paris would be more detailed to overlay. The who process turned out to be not as bad as I thought and the final product turned out to be not to bad. It was interesting to see how similar the two maps actually are. And the way they fit was very simple.

There is not doubt that slavery had made a huge impact in the way our society it built today. And there is no doubt that slavery was one of the major driving forces in the cause of the civil war. However, what many don’t necessarily realize and what historians are discovering is that slavery set much more of a precedence in the United States than we think. When reading “The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities” by William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, it was interesting looking at the whole situation of slavery from a historian point of view.

First, although slavery is an archaic and barbaric concept, its origins dates back to times when life was at its most archaic and barbaric, since the beginning of time. Slavery was thriving during the time of the Egyptians and the Roman Empire up until it was most prominent in the United States in the Southern states. However, as life became more modern and less dependent on people rather than machines and rights and validity of the human existence became more sacred for all humans; the need and moral standing for slavery started to stir in people’s minds. Slavery has set the foundation for many historical cities and landmarks to be made today. With that said, this article states that slavery did more in the Southern States than just help provide a fluid economy. Slavery created a cultural precedence and a social standing for the South.

In addition, there was this constant struggle between slavery and the institutions of modernity, which was what the Northern States were trying to accomplish. However, while the Southern states were reaching towards that, it became clear that Slavery was holding them back. This article focuses a great deal on the concept of Modernity, which can be best described by Robin Blackburn as:

the growth of instrumental rationality, the rise of national sentiment and the nation-state, racialized perceptions of identity, the spread of market relations and wage labour, the development of administrative bureaucracies and modern tax systems, the growing sophistication of commerce and communication, the birth of consumer societies, the publication of newspapers and the beginnings of press advertising, ‘action at a distance’ and an individualist sensibility.”

Some claim that this is the major factor for the start of the Civil War, however some would argue that the cultural tensions between the north and the south were beginning to rise swiftly and this was just the major factor that they needed. Despite the clear cultural and fundamental differences, Thomas and Ayers would argue that on many different levels the two states were more similar than we realized. While the concept of modernization has a clear definition, the extent of it’s meaning can lead to different interpretations depending on what your goal is. Which caused a lot of conflict for the North and the South. For example, the North embodied the characteristics of modern society-democracy, economic innovation, and social mobility where the South, still claiming their modernization, very much were against those characteristics. This also leads to the constant debate about slavery and contract labor in detail and in relationship to one another. In order to analyze the two in relation to the North and South conflicts, Thomas and Ayers turned to the Geographic Information Systems or the GIS. This helps in understanding the social structures and how they were arranged by developing certain bits of information. By developing all of the information they need the GIS allows them to understand how the social standing happened with the development of Slavery in the United States, as mentioned previously, during the rise up to the Civil War.

So I attempted to make a chart of how a normal week in my life looks and this was what I came up with. Overall, it was relatively simple to enter the information and have the computer do all the configurations. At first it was difficult and I didn’t know what chart to pick, but eventually I got it and I chose the pie chart because for what I was doing, it seemed like the most compatible chart.

So after reading the post, “How I got my digital life back” by, Matt Honan, it made me very nervous about the security of my computer. It is so easy for any hacker to literally just tap into my computer and literally do anything to it. What struck me the most about this article was the lack of security that we truly possess and how much it can disrupt your life. When this hacker decided that this person for whatever reason was the one to hack it happened so swiftly and with ease. What was really scary was he could take on his identity do whatever and have others think it is the original person. Like saying profane things on his twitter and there is nothing you can do about it. When I had a myspace in middle school I found out that I was “sending” strange videos to my friends when I really wasn’t and that idea and lack of security freaked me out so much that I immediately deleted my myspace account.

When the hacker was able to infiltrate his computer system It completely caused his digital life to go into shock. He literally had to go from the ground up and start fresh after being forced to completely shut down his system. However, when he shut them out, he ultimately shut himself out too.

When hackers broke into my iCloud account and wiped my devices, my first assumption was that someone had broken into my local network. So the first thing I did was shut down the internet and turn off all of my other machines. I wanted those assholes out of my house. But that also meant I had no way to send or receive data.

 

Luckily though, he had the 1password program (which I didn’t know existed until this blog or this class). It allows you to store all of your passwords into one system and to access it all you have to do is to just log in with one password. Luckily Honan was able to retrieve his passwords since they weren’t technically on his computer, but on his 1password program roaming the internet. What was an advantage though that did help him exponentially was that his job is a technology journalist. Which therefore gave him that extra edge in knowing what to do and how to retrieve everything properly. I feel like if this happened to me, I would not know what to do at all. I would just panic and hope that I saved everything on my external hard drive previously. God! And the fact that the hacker even bragged about hacking on Honan’s twitter is just too much. I wouldn’t even be able to truly understand how far they have actually wrecked my computer without talking to an expert first. Luckily, the people at apple were super supportive and helpful (which is refreshing). Another thing that I didn’t know was that it is important to accept microsoft updates when they are provided because it is harder to warn off hackers when the system is up to date and accounted for as well.

Luckily though, all in all Honan was able to regain his digital life, which I realize now is actually more vital to function than I realized. Let’s just hope that some random hacker won’t tap into my system the way Phobia did for him. Luckily though I don’t exactly have anything on my computer that is so important that it needs to be hacked, but who knows.

You may have not heard of this song, but The Amen Brothers by The Winstons was a fairly popular rock/jazz song released in 1969. However, what you really may not have known is that there is a particular break in the middle of the song (about 1:27 in this youtube video of it: that was inevitably one of the gateways into hip hop in the early 90s. Also this break is so familiar to our ears today, it is still being used in modern songs and countless commercials today as well. This may not seem like that big of a deal (even though it is) but what If I told you that none of the members of The Winstons actually signed off on this song or actually allowed there song to be taken and used like that?

Although none of the original members of The Winstons are playing today, they are all still alive and have seen the way their song (or the 6 second break in the song) has been simple handed out. This is a blat-en sign of Copyright infringement. And for this song to be so well known and not from its original origins, that is a problem. For example, what happens if something like this happens again when a song is taken with out the proper legal procedures and just used and used and used for multiple contexts? It’s to the point where no one recognizes the band, yet everyone can pin point a song or commercial from when they heard it. Even I didn’t know who the Winstons let alone that they created this song, but I was able to recognize the beat from pop culture references. It’s interesting hearing this song in it’s original form and then hearing countless 90s hip hop and rap songs incorporating this beat, the Amen Break, as their main threads. They even tried to speed it up or up it next to a different beat as well or tried placing it into a different genre, but through it all, you can still hear that original beat. It’s almost as if those people are just not being creative enough to create their own music and their own beat. One point made was one musician tried to mix it with Led Zeppelin, “whole lotta love” which was ironically released in 1969 the same date Amen Brothers was released. An interesting point that the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac points out is how it almost opened the door for our generations music. By not putting a copyright on that beat it has given other artists the opportunity to use it and make it their own and in result create genre within a culture. What is annoying though, is that the company Zero G has appropriated the Amen Break and now you must go to them in order to get copyright permission to use it when they weren’t even the ones who created the song. While the members of the band are still alive, none of them have pressed any charges or have tried to obtain the rights, however situations such as the Amen Break should not go unnoticed in this society of “new” music. With each new generation, it is important to learn from the past to help fuel the future. However, that doesn’t mean copying a whole’s song originality and claiming that it is their own.

People say that a picture is worth a thousands words. However, no one ever said that a picture can potentially start a war. When using a certain type of photo with a certain type of message during a particular moment in time, the consequences of what can come of those pictures can be life changing or even detrimental. Now, let me throw in a twist: what happens when those pictures that can start a world war….are fake? That’s a scary thought, because it is entirely plausible. There images “created” everyday meant to changes people’s perspectives that are actually not even true. And what does that say for us as a society that we are so willing to believe everything we see before looking into the facts. In this post we will discover key points of Errol Morris’, “Photography as a Weapon” and try to understand what could inevitably be the true weapon of mass destruction.

The article first talks about the Missiles from Iran that could of potentially started a war, but were to be revealed as Photoshopped later on. At first I didn’t see it, but when they actually circled the areas where you can clearly see where they had Photoshopped, as you can see in the image provided:

To me that’s CRAZY that so much hype and controversy can come from something that does not even exist. I found it funny how Charles said they didn’t even do a good or creative job if the image is supposed to create such an impact.

CHARLES JOHNSON: Well, you can take the image into Photoshop and exaggerate the contrast, or do some other kinds of manipulations. That can show you where areas were cut and pasted. There is no need to really put it under the microscope when it’s staring you in the face.

 

It’s nice to know that some images such as these can be spotted so easily. However, what about the Photoshopped images that are a little better at covering their tracks…

It’s true that the majority of us are visual learners and can better retain images than listen to someone telling us about said image. It comes down to a neurological level where 30 to 50 percent of our brain is taking things in visually. With that said, though, even though someone is showing us a photo under the pretext of, “This is fake by the way.” We still remember the image nevertheless and still associate that image with certain memories and things we know. Photographers know that and use that to their advantage. That doesn’t mean though that every photo that isn’t Photoshopped is automatically true. It could mean that they were staged to tell a certain message or come across as if they were true or in other words… they’re false. Such as the photo taken at Kent State to give a message about the war:

On that note, Morris makes an excellent point by stating that you shouldn’t try to figure out if something is Photoshopped or not by comparing it to a real image, but rather comparing the fake image to another fake image as a way of confirmation.

However, beside focusing so much on how awful Photoshop can be for our society, let’s change the focus on how is can be used as a positive thing and a weapon to make a point about corruption instead of an actual weapon. Helmut Herzfeld is a perfect example of one who knows how to up this practice into good use. During the time of World War I, propaganda was really starting to make a claim where the government was basically trying to shape how the people of Germany were supposed to feel. Therefore, Herzfeld used that notion to his advantage and incorporated irony to make his point by creating (not even Photoshopping) an image of a German man who’s head is completely covered in newspaper or “propaganda” with the caption saying,

“Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf. Away with these stultifying bandages.”

All in all I found the article extremely informative. Perhaps my favorite article I’ve read so far. It incorporates the subject well, but in a way that I’m constantly engaged and and concerned at the same time. When the article is so good that at every turn you are correlating what it’s saying to elements in your own life, then that’s when you get a successful story. While the notion of Photoshop is barely reaching it’s true potential, what’s important to understand is not only the power it holds, but what that means for us, the ones who get to control the type of power in-store for humanity.

So after finally realizing that google searching wasn’t going to cut it, I have found hopefully what I was looking for.

I ended up using ProQuest, which I have never heard of till last class so I figured I would give it a try and found quite a lot. When I put in the search for the first item,An op-ed on a labor dispute involving public school teachers from before 1970, I ended up with this article, a strike without reason. It was very informative and covered the requirements for the scavenger hunt.

The Second item in the scavenger hunt,the first documented use of solar power in the United State, It was a little more difficult because the request itself isn’t that specific in search and therefore, received a lot of broad results on ProQuest. I found some options, but the dates seemed to vary too much and seemed like they were too recent for being the first use of solar power. After much search, I found myself unsatisfied with the dates I was finding and couldn’t really find anything concrete so I just moved on.

The third item on the scavenger hunt’s list, the best resource for the history of California ballot initiatives, including voting data, was kind of frustrating to find on ProQuest and I ended up just not using that sight. Therefore, I ended up searching on google…scholar. I did happen to find this snazzy pdf that fulfilled the credentials it required for the scavenger hunt.

The hunt wasn’t as bad as I thought I was going to be. My immediate thought was, “Oh no! Where am I supposed to search If I can’t google it?!” But eventually I realized there are plenty other search engines out there that prove to be more beneficial academically. I do prefer the way Google goes about their search and how they organize it such as, relevancy verses alphabetically like some do. In terms of research itself, the other university provided search sites are better for legitimate research.