I can say it did take me a while to get used to the differences.  It took me some time to get used to the red (close), yellow (restore) and green (minimize) circles, as I was constantly looking for that big red ‘X’ in the upper right hand corner of my screen.  When trying to get on the internet, I was trying to find Internet Explorer until I realized that it is called Safari on a Mac.  It also took me a while to figure out what the Microsoft Word of the Mac is, but once I found it, I realized that it was just as easy to use.  In fact, once I started messing around on the Mac, I found that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  It was pretty much the same as my PC.  I found that it was not what I’m used to, but like anything else, if I spent the time to learn the ins and outs of the programs, I’m sure that I’d get used to the Mac too.

While I certainly don’t feel that I will use a Mac frequently, I don’t feel that I couldn’t use one if I had too.  But the next time I get a chance I will definitely “blaze away” on a Mac to discover what else it has to offer.

In any case, in an effort to understand what some of the applications of AI are, I found a site by John McCarthy from Stanford U.  The following are a few applications that he provides, and my examples of where we can find computers running these applications today.

One is speech recognition.  If you have a cell phone, most of them have speech recognition dialing.  You can program your phone to dial a person’s phone number by simply saying their name.  Another example is when you call credit card companies.  When I call my credit company with a question, I am prompted to either say my credit card number or type it in using my telephone number pad.  If I choose to say my number, the computer recognizes the numbers that I am speaking and is able to process that information to provide me with my requested information.

Another is handwriting recognition.  I can use the stylus of my Dell Axim to write what I want to write (in a word document), and then the Axim converts my writing into typed text.  Although it sometimes confuses the letters I had intended for it to type, most of the time it can decipher my writing with amazing accuracy.  Tablet PCs are also available now which I thought would be helpful for taking notes in class.  By writing on a special tablet of the laptop, the computer will transform your written words into typed text.       

These were just two examples of AI in computers.  While I do think that computers act intelligently, I don’t think that they think.  However, I think that we as humans allow computers to do a lot of thinking for us.  In fact, maybe we allow them to do too much thinking for us.  We have become so dependent on computers and technology, that I think we would have a hard time surviving in a world without them.  At work this past summer, we lost power for 4 hours, and it was like we had returned to the dark ages.  None of us were able to complete any work, or even attempt to do work, because the information that we rely on to do our jobs is all housed on our computers.  We humans could not perform any intellectual work related activities without our computers, and we couldn’t even think of how to accomplish anything without them.  I think in the future, more and more of the computers we work with will become more and more interactive.  We will have to adapt to this changing work environment in order to succeed.

Organization:  It should be obvious to us that information is best understood when it is presented in an organized fashion.  Spreadsheets do just that.  You can take a bunch of information, type it into the spreadsheet, and then organize it in any way you’d like.  By cutting, copying, pasting and sorting you can rearrange your data in a way that you feel it would be understood the best.  Spreadsheets offer a clear and concise view of precisely what you are trying to convey to those who are looking at it. 

Make reports look professional:  One of the functions of spreadsheets that I like working with are the tables and graphs that you can create with the data entered into your spreadsheet.  I’ve created pie charts, line graphs, and histograms using the data I’ve entered into my spreadsheet to reflect budget expenditures and survey results.  The nicest thing about them is that if you do a line graph, but then decide a histogram would better suit your needs, you can easily get rid of one and replace it with the other.  Most supervisors would rather look at a graph which gives him or her the data they are looking for quickly, rather than taking their own time to muddle through the numbers.

Track budgets expenditures and revenues:  I spend most of my time working with spreadsheets to do budget tracking.  Many of the computations Snyder mentions in his chapter are those that I use to track budget expenditures and revenue at my job now.  Using a spreadsheet, you can always tell whether you’re running a deficit or surplus, which enables you to make adjustments as necessary.

Recently I was able to use the import operation of Excel while working with data from the US Department of Education.  The data that I needed was in SPSS format, and in order to make the data easier to clean, I imported it into an excel spreadsheet.  This way I was able to work with the data in a format that I was familiar with and comfortable using, which allowed me to save the time it would have taken me to learn how to use SPSS to clean the data.

I’ve found that experience with spreadsheets is something that employers do in fact look for.  Anything that can help you prove that you wil be an efficient and productive employee over other candidates can definitely help you to get a job.  Being proficient with spreadsheets has enabled me to impress my employers, and spreadsheets I have created at work can continue to be used by them, even if I leave the company. 

According to the FTC, technology has allowed detailed information about people to be shared more quickly and cheaper than it ever has been.  And they do point to some valid reasons one may choose to give up their privacy, so to speak.  Benefits of sharing of information listed by the FTC are that it makes it easier for law enforcement to track down criminals, for banks to prevent fraud, and for consumers to learn about new products and services.  I can’t say that I don’t want criminals to be caught, so, on the one hand I can understand the reasons behind this.  But it still leaves me feeling uneasy. Detailed personal information about all of us can certainly help to protect us from the “bad guys”, but if the “bad guys” dig up my personal information first, then I may still end up being victimized.  It seems like a gamble, but it is one that we are forced to take anytime we give out information about ourselves to U.S. companies.

The European Union Policy directive considers personal privacy a human right, and it is protected as such.  The EU directive tries to protect its citizens’ privacy rights by enacting regulations for information use and sharing.  The U.S. has more of a self regulatory approach to privacy, while the EU adopts a governmental regulatory approach.  Because of this, the EU has privacy standards that are followed by each of its member countries which require that data on their citizens follow these same standards when it leaves their country.  The U.S. doesn’t have this, and therefore U.S. businesses have to individually prove that they provide adequate privacy protections in order to be allowed to do business with EU organizations.

According to Snyder, the U.S. has some very strict privacy protections in place, but they don’t cover everyone in every situation.  On the other hand, the EU provides the same level of privacy protections to everyone.  It’s difficult for me to decide which is the best – strict when it needs to be, but easygoing when it doesn’t, or a set standard across the board.  I can see the benefits to both approaches, and I think that only time will tell which one is the better system.

From the One Laptop per Child (OPLC) website, their mission is to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive laptops to provide every child in the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves, and allow them to access knowledge and modern forms of education. A question that came to mind while reading the article was how are the laptops powered when being used in a third world country where electricity is very scarce, if it exists at all? The answer is that certain models of these laptops are powered with hand cranks or foot pedals. In fact, these laptops have most of the capability of laptops we may have, except they do not have the ability to store large amounts of data. Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Thailand have tentatively agreed to partner with OPLC to provide their schoolchildren with this same capability. Children worldwide may soon be able to communicate with and learn from each other using their very own laptop provided by their country. What a great way for children to learn about each others’ cultures and countries!

Picture of OLPC $100 laptop; Courtesy of Design Continuum

Article found in the NY Times: http://snipurl.com/12gu9

The way this works is quite simple.  According to www.goodsearch.com, search engines “generated close to $6 billion in revenue from advertisers”, and that was just last year.  Goodsearch.com’s idea is to take some of the advertising money earned from searches conducted on their site and donate it to the charity of the searcher’s choice.  On their site they say that 50% of this advertising money is donated to the charity you choose, which comes out to be around $0.01 per search.  Goodsearch.com is “powered by Yahoo!”, so they say that you should get “the same high-quality search results you’re accustomed to”. 

There is not a way on the site to search through all of the charities that you can contribute the money from your searches to.  However, all you need to do is type in the charity you’re looking for in the “Who do you GoodSearch for?” box, and see if it comes up.  If it doesn’t, you can request that it be added.  GoodSearch will verify the charity’s nonprofit status and then add it to their database.

I have just started using GoodSearch.com, and have been pleased with the results.  Only one time did my search fail because of the high volume of searches going on.  If you do searches on the internet anyway, you might as well use a search engine that actually contributes to the charity of your choice!  Check this out at:  www.goodsearch.com

One of the interesting things about looking through the indexes are some of the titles of the articles written for NSA employees. Some of the most interesting ones I found were: “BS Attitudes: How Things Work in Bureaucracy”, “Cranks, Nuts and Screwballs”, “An Unsolved Puzzle Solved”, “The History of Applesauce” and ”Is Yugoslav President Tito Really a Yugoslav?”. 

What is good about being able to look through the indexes is that you are able to pick out and then request the specific documents that you want from the NSA when making a FOIA request.  According to Jeffrey Richelson, senior fellow at The National Security Archive, this can help you get the documents you want in a more timely fashion, without having to make a blanket request for documents on a certain subject.  As pointed out by Richelson however, the documents won’t contain any big national security secrets.  “There are likely no great news stories in here, especially when you take into account what you are getting compared to what is in the articles before redactions (by NSA FOIA officials),” he said.  

In any case, the information provided by this site could be used for historical research purposes, as well as enabling anyone to request specific documents from the NSA on certain subject matter that may be relevant to their studies.

Article on wired.com:   http://snipurl.com/zqn2

NSA indexes on thememoryhole.org:  http://snipurl.com/zqn5

I will start with HTML.  I think it’s amazing how much work really goes into the websites I look at daily.  I’ve been playing around with the source function under view in the toolbar to see how what I’m looking at online is actually written.  I don’t know that I’ll ever use HTML to design a website myself, but it is definitely interesting to see how it works.  Because I didn’t know a thing about HTML, the whole chapter in the Snyder book made me more fluent with technology.  At the very least I now understand the basics of it.

As far as searching the web goes, I thought I was an expert.  When I started to read this chapter, I thought to myself, how did Snyder write a whole chapter on searching for information?  What’s so hard about that? After I completed the chapter I realized why – it’s because there’s more to searching the web than just typing a word into the search box and sifting through the responses.  Here’s what I learned, although most of the information in this chapter will help me become a more efficient and effective searcher:

1.  The existance of the “Invisible Web”.  I thought that when I did a search for an item, every possible webpage relating to my subject of interest would be returned to me by the search engine.  I was surprised to learn that I was wrong, because according to Snyder “search engines crawl only a fraction (substantially less than half) of the Web”.

 2.  Page ranking.  I always wondered how it was determined what pages were returned to me in a search.  How was it decided which sites would be listed first, and which would be last?  Since I mainly use Google, it was interesting to me that they rank pages by counting the links to a page (Google calls them votes).  Snyder describes Google’s ranking system as “the more links there are to a page, the more relevant it must be”, and those are the sites that are listed first.  The book pointed out an interesting fact on Google’s system of page ranking – a “vote” for a site can come from those who are complaining about something in regards to the site.  Whether it’s positive or negative information, a vote for a site is a vote for a site.

3.  Using a minus sign in a search.  When you do search within results in Google, you can type the minus sign before the term you want to eliminate from the results to narrow your search.

4.  Checking to find out if a site is legitimate or not.  Snyder tells us to go to www.internic.net/whois.html which lists the company that assigned the site’s IP address (domain) to find out if a site is legitimate.  You can also go to the WhoIS Server site and type in the domain name or IP address, and you be be given the owner’s name and physical address.  Here’s the information that came up when I requested it from Internic on the University of Pittsburgh’s site, pitt.edu:

    Domain Name: PITT.EDU

Registrant:
   University of Pittsburgh
   600 Epsilon Drive
   Pittsburgh, PA 15238
   UNITED STATES

Administrative Contact:
   Jinx Walton
   Director
   Computing Services and Systems Development
   728 Cathedral of Learning
   Pittsburgh, PA 15260
   UNITED STATES
   (412) 624-6114
   jpw@pitt.edu

Technical Contact:
   CSSD NOC
   Network Operations Center
   University of Pittsburgh
   600 Epsilon Drive
   Pittsburgh, PA 15238
   UNITED STATES
   (412) 624-6714
   noc-networkengineers@exchange.cis.pitt.edu

Name Servers:
   NS4-QIP.NS.PITT.EDU      136.142.15.13
   NS5-QIP.NS.PITT.EDU      130.49.127.11

Domain record activated:    21-Jun-1989
Domain record last updated: 26-Jul-2006
Domain expires:             31-Jul-2007
The legitimacy of websites is important because you can’t always believe everything you read on the internet.  Making sure you’re getting information from a legitimate site is one of many ways to make sure that the information you are getting is from a trustworthy source.

There are people on both sides of this issue – those against violent video games and those who do not see them as harmful.  According to the article, many legislators have denounced the company, including Sen. Hilary Clinton (D-NY).  Some states even ban the sale and rental of certain video games to children under a certain age.  But I don’t think it’s up to the legislators, or the justice system to decide what children should and should not be playing.  It’s up to parents.  If I don’t want my child playing these video games, I won’t buy them or allow my child to purchase them, and other parents should do the same if they think the games “provoke violent behavior”. 

I personally don’t believe in using the justice system for lawsuits such as this, mainly because I do not think that you can blame someone’s behavior on something like a game.  This is a good example of how technology is now being blamed for a person’s actions, and I don’t think that makes much sense.

http://snipurl.com/xex1

Some tips from this site, which expand on those that Snyder teaches us, are: 

1.  Authority:  Who created the site? Do they provide credentials? Is the site maintained by a reputable organization?

2.  Accuracy:  Are there typos? Are their sources sited for their claims and information?

3.  Objectivity:  Is the information biased, or objective? Are they trying to sell you something?

4.  Currency:  When was the site last updated? Are there hyperlinks to resources that don’t exist?

5.  Coverage:  Is the site just for fun or is it scholarly? Are both sides of the issue provided? What is the geographical area of the information? What is the time period? Is it the original document or has it been edited or altered in some way?

It is important for us as students, as well as professionals, to make sure that the information we are using that has been gathered from the internet is accurate.  Using information that we find without investigating its validity first can end up costing us good grades, or worse, possibly disseminating false information to the public in our careers.  All it costs is a little of our time to ensure accuracy.  After all, none of us wants to be the person saying we want to buy the Burmese Mountain Dog we saw on the web……..