The crowd

Crowd sourcing is a very profitable field. It is basically making other people do you r work for you, for free. Google has nailed this type of work. Based on the data they collect they make applications more user friendly, in doing so they have essentially cut out the middle man. Google Maps is one application people use daily that helps everyone. As the official Google Blog mentions, "When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions". So some companies do use it for good. A lot of industries are getting nailed for this because they are abusing their customers and collecting sensitive data. Google knows not to step into that realm as the backlash could cost them billions of dollars.

Data mining is quite the lucrative field if you're a small company though. A lot of apps ask for access to your location and spending habits. amazon uses this to show you things that maybe you would like to buy. It allows for them to move more product and get more companies on their supply list.



google blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/bright-side-of-sitting-in-traffic.html

Gaming

The evolution of computer graphics has been incredible. Not too long ago, people were still looking at very basic 2 dimensional objects on screens with low resolution.  With the tremendous growth in the field of computer graphics, the same games have become hundred times better with high resolution. Computer graphics has helped kids characters come to life and bring a new level of excitement into their lives.

We see one of the first online games, doom, as the first stepping stone into what is now massive online gameplay. Doom was made to play online with other people back when dial up internet technology was present. From there we have moved to having thousands to millions of players online. World of Warcraft alone boasts more than 10 million players. From computer gaming we moved onto created console gaming as there was such a demand for it. Now they are so ingrained in our society that the NSA even spies on them, as Chris Morris mentions in his blog, "
The 82-page document suggests that government agencies have long been concerned that terrorists or criminal groups could use virtual worlds to 'hide in plain sight'"

Console gaming is by far one of the most popular types of gaming. With games like halo and call of duty being the front runners of the industry. As we’ve gone through the years we have moved from 2D games to 3d games. Players are now able to see individual blades of grass and bullets piecing walls.

The next frontier is actually making the player experience the action of the game. Oculus makes a headset that actually makes you feel like you are in the game. It is a excting new field and im curious to see where it goes.


 Chris Morris's Blog
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/report-nsa-spying-online-games-175511620.html

They're watching

There have always been conspiracy's in the world. Big foot, area 51,  and yes, there are people who don't believe the moon exists. Some of these conspiracy's are truly wacky. however some things that you think are impossible are sometimes being done without your knowledge and are very real. For this we look at the NSA.

Recently thanks to a former employee of the NSA, Edward Snowden, leaking files of what the NSA is actually doing. The NSA since as early as 2008, have been spying on American citizens, the people who fund them. They have been collecting phone calls, messages, and yes your internet traffic. It's not only us that they're spying on though, its the rest of the first world. Information on other countries leaders and people of importance. This is a huge invasion of privacy that we as a nation, have done nothing about. I don't think people quite understand how invasive this is. the NSA has the capability of turning on your laptop camera and microphone without your knowledge and recording your most private moments. They have your search history and access to your data. even most encrypted data is accessible.As mentioned in Washingtons blog one of formal NSA officials that helped make the surveillance system admits that "We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state." It's funny in a way that the money we earn and pay taxes on, is funding a agency that is spying on us, so in turn, we are spying on us, and giving the information to less than reputable people.

So what do we as a country do about this? I'm not ok with my money going into this program. I think  the money would be better spent on social programs or to schools or anything that gives the US more infrastructure. We only have ourselves as citizens to blame for this intrusive government program, and we will have to be the ones to fix it as well.



Washington's blog:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/former-top-nsa-official-now-police-state.html

Domo Erigato, Mr. Roboto

Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prominent in our culture. AI is any software that makes a decision based on what information it has gathered. this includes things like autofill on your smart phones all the way to IBM's Watson. Artificial intelligence has made our lives easier when trying to do the most mundane tasks such as texting or trying to find the fastest route to where we want to go.

We look at  a higher level AI such as IBM's Watson. Watson was created to show off IBM's technology on the game show jeopardy where he beat every single human opponent. He is so powerful he can process 500 gigabytes, the equivalent of a million books, per second. This is the power of AI currently. Someday we will reach the stage at which robots preforms surgeries and other difficult tasks we as humans take years to learn how to do, and they will learn it over the course of a few hours. As Steve Hamm mentions in his blog, " This vision is not science fiction. Because of today’s advances in computing, we’ll hold learning machines in our hands in the foreseeable future. "
We already have robots on mars gathering samples of rock and satellites maintaining orbit of the earth.


AI has a lot to offer us and the more advanced technology becomes the more applications of AI we can apply to our lives. Someday our most advanced tasks will be done by AI and then what? where does that place us as humans?













 Steve Hamm's Blog
 http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2013/12/ibms-5-5-future-computers-will-learn.html

Computer Science

Computers have been been growing smaller and faster as each generation passes. It's hard to imagine that computers used to be entire buildings and the internet didn't even exist! fast forward 60 years and our current computers are immensely more powerful than the ones that used to take up entire buildings. Technology has come so far that its hard to imagine its roots. \

The only way to input into a computer used to be punch cards. You may have had to go through 10 punch cards to do one mathematical operation. now we do millions of operations in our laptop and desktop computers per second. Old computers used to use vacuum tubes to store information, if a tube went bad your calculations would be off. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computers starting when computers became household items. They

no longer needed to be the size of a building, just the size of your computer now.

Mobile devices also changed due to advances in technology. People used to have huge phones the size of your head to talk to people through a wireless network. Now do we not only have phones that fit in your palm, they have screens you can touch as well. Touch screens and games with bright magnificent colors that play through a story. It truly is a wonder how far we have come in such a short amount of time.

The programming languages used in these devices get more and more powerful as time goes on as well. One of the oldest languages, C is still very much in use today. In Kasia Mikoluk blog she mentions C as "C is powerful, stable, and easily available on virtually all platforms."  Strict limitations on memory and how to send and retrieve information has only made these languages more efficient at their tasks.

Without the study of computer science none of this would be possible. Algorithms and efficiency issues pondered over for hours upon hours. Where computer science is taking technology is not truly known. its only limited to what our imaginations can create.


Kasia Mikoluk Blog:
https://www.udemy.com/blog/best-programming-language/

Sharing is caring

file sharing is when one person shares another file with another person on their computer. This effectively makes a copy of this file. This has come under scrutiny by companies as a form of stealing. However instead of charging for theft, companies are charging people with copy-right infringement(a far harsher crime).

A very popular way to share files online is through bit-torenting sites. With bit-torrents you download parts of a file from a set of computers who have the same file. It's a very fast and efficient way of downloading files. However for it to work a multitude of computers must have the file and allow streaming of that file.This is under scrutiny by companies because only one person needs to buy their software for everyone to have it. They intimidate people into not sharing files by suing small families for large sums of money. A family's son was sued for downloading 12 songs off a bit torrent site and was successfully sued for 645,000 dollars. If he had bought the songs he would have paid 12 dollars. This Disgusting practice has become common over the past few years to where is some small businesses whole business plan.

The reality of it is that these bit torrent sites help companies more than they hurt them. Heck they even add jobs to the market, as mentioned in Utorrents Blog, " For the past few months our engineers have been hard at work developing a mobile BitTorrent app that is worthy of the name “µTorrent.” In order to live up to our high standards, we knew that the app would need to be fast, lightweight, powerful and better than anything else currently on the market." Thanks to bit-torrent sites company products get far more recognition than they would have if they weren't on these sites. If people like a product they will pay for that product. What these companies are doing to small familys is both wrong and immoral. The music and movie industry are huge perpetrators in this now common act of suing. I still fail to see how a movie downloaded for 20 dollars is suddenly worth 2 million if it's torrented.



Utorrents blog:
http://blog.utorrent.com/

How do we store information?

How we store information is a big deal in the computing world. It lets us access information in a timely matter and get what we need. In the computing world, all information is stored in som

e kind of data structure. When you look up your friends on facebook or linked-in, all that information is stored and accessed using algorithms. Information is stored in various data structures such as B-trees, graphs, hash tables, and arrays.

Quick-Sort

What kind of information is being stored and our limitations will tell us what data structure we should use. Different data structures for minimum storage size may be an array or linked list. however the search time for an item in the list isnt as great as another data structure. So with each data structure there are trade offs. There is no overall perfect data structure for all information. If the want a fast sorting algorithm it may take up more more space than one that takes longer with a smaller space requirement. In a blog written by
Andy Lim, he mentions memory issues and constraints of different systems, he  says"
These two architectures lead to various pros and cons relative to each other and to the standard matrix format."

Data Structures are the core foundation on which to program. You cant get by without knowing these things. Every piece of technology you use has some kind of association with data structures and algorithms. In short, you need to know Data Structures to be a Computer Science major, it is the foundation of modern computing.




Andy Lim Blog:
http://blog.custora.com/tag/data-structures/