Homework 12

Question1) Comment on Toxoplasma Gondii. What do you think??
Thinking about how parasites ( and diseases in general) can affect behavior  really makes me wonder about how and why things happened in the past, and how and why things will happen in the future. Were some of the "bad things" that happened in history due to someone being infected with a parasite or a disease? If so, how would it have been different had that parasite been eradicated prior to that person being born?
(This is the butterfly effect all over again, I am afraid...).
In class, you also posed the question whether one should be screened for certain diseases or parasites prior to being elected for political office.  Well, if someone gets elected, it is because of who they are and how they act.  Since these parasites take a while to manifest themselves and make obvious changes in behavior, then it seems reasonable to think that there won't be radical ("overnight") changes in behavior while the person is in office.  Also, it may be BECAUSE of the parasite and its effect on the behavior that the person is popular and got elected.  Maybe without it the persone would not be the "go-getter" that got him elected (or similar).
It seems mind-boggeling that an organism so small could have such an effect on human kind.

Also, could we potentially use parasites that can change behaviors as "biological weapons", not to kill or make people sick physically, but to change how they act?  Could we find a way to make agressive people more mellow and easier to compromise with?
What would happen if certain parasites were eradicated?  could now peacful nations turn violent because people there were infected and it made them mellow???

Question 2) I will email you the poster...

Question3)  Think about the impact of information and/or computing privacy, security, and quality, etc. on individuals like you. Then explain what these conclusions mean for society as a whole now and in the future, as follows.
a) privacy
b) security
c) quality
d) some other one of your choice

As far as privacy, I think that individuals will have less because of the increasing use of computers in daily lives.  It is easy to find out inforation about people by simply googling them, checking on their tweets and facebook entries.  Some of that loss of privacy is with a certain amount of consent from the individual (ie. if you make a post on your facebook or twitter, you should KNOW that people will look at it...).  If you use a cellphone, people can track your location.  If you access an online account, the computer you access it from can be traced, so people may know where you were or are at any given point. So therefore, as far as society as a whole is concerned, I think we are getting more and more used to less privacy and a certain amount of invasion into our assumed privacy.  In the future, I think this will only get "worse" because we are relying more and more on computers and technology.
As far as security goes, I think there is a lot that needs to be improved and worked on.  From a technical standpoint, as well as policies and also consumer education.  Some companies are easier to hack into and steal for example credit card information than others, it seems.  Some companies forward certain types of information to third parties, with or without the knowledge of customers.  And then there are people who are either unaware or simply just neglectful and give out certain types of information over the interenet that they should not.  I think in the future, with increasing advances in technology and also increasing awareness, these issues will become better (after first getting worse and coming to a head, though).  Eventually, there will be better security and policies in place, and people will know better than to post certain types of information that will compromise their security (personal or financial).
Quality will also increase.  personally I catch myself using more and more online services.  I use the online app from my bank so I don't have to get paper statements, I am attending online classes as opposed to having to drive to school, I am ordering gift online rather than going to the store and actually paying more for the item, and I am renting text books from an online company that does it way cheaper than any physical store near me.  So for me as an individual, quality has definitely improved.  For society as a whole, i think it has improved as well and will keep improving with more and more things that can be done online.  Also, there are many people that without a computer, they would not be able to easily communicate with others, or be able to buy certain things (for example if you lived far from any bigger cities, or in a different country than your friends and families, and especially military personnel (see answer to d) )).As far as in the future, there will be more and more people taking advantage of these things, and our quality of life overall will increase.  It will, however, take away from some of the things that we currently cherish, such as small mom&pop stores that may not be able or willing to keep up with technology, that will then no longer be able to compete.  Also, the "personal touch" will be gone.  You will not get the same feeling going to order something on amazon as when you walked into the department store in your town where you know some of the sales associates by name, or the teller in your bank that you see once a week and became friendly with.
I think technology and computing has really changed the military.  Aside from the obvious gains in being able to gain knowledge about the enemy, etc.  I think it has changed on  a personal level for the soldiers.  They can communicate with their loved ones much easier, have facebook pages, and SEE their kids while they talk to them on skype or similar servivces.  If I were a soldier, I think that would make it a little easier and get me through the day a bit better.  They do not have to wait weeks for letters and photos anymore.  They don't have to worry about not knowing what is going on at home.   Fathers are able to "see" (online) the birth of their children, first steps, hear first words.
So as long as soldiers don't give away their positions while using twitter (I heard a radio article about that), I think computing has greatly improved the well-being of soldiers and families at home.

Homework 11

1)

If I were to get a robot that could only do one thing, I would get a robot that can learn.  If it can learn, then I can teach it things, and then it can do new things.  (I guess this is considered cheating, like asking the Genie for unlimited wishes?)  So if I had a robot that could only do one thing, and it is not learning or getting smarter, I would   want one of the yardba’s…or farmerbots???  Having something to provide me with food seems like a really good idea, especially since I have the ungreenest thumb EVER! (Even my tomatoes die on me… L ).  If it ever got to the point where one has to provide their own food, it would make sure I survive as well as free up my time so I can do other things.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=robot-learning

http://science.howstuffworks.com/robot-pictures.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/robots-channel.htm

I sure wish that my free coupon would be for the ASIMO robot...

2)

I will email you this

3)

Watching these time-lapse videos really made me think about the concept of change…sometimes, you hardly notice things change.  For example, your children.  You don’t notice that they change daily – but they do.  If you don’t see them for a while, then you notice the change.  Then some things, even though they change, they really still are the same…for example the people in the time laps videos.  Their hair, glasses, or environment changed, but you could tell it was them. Other things, like the forensic examples, or the buildings, really do change.

So I guess enjoy the moment, because it will change soon.  You may not notice it, but it will.  Also, even if everything still seems the same, it has changed – you just are not aware of it.  Every moment is important, something is happening at all times.  Pay attention!

I think these are really cool – however, unless you have a camera set up to take remote pictures – it seems very time consuming.  I wonder if these people are now more aware of their surroundings??? Do they notice things that other people don’t since they did these projects?

Homework 10

1)
When I conducted my survey on how people envision the future, many survey takers said that robotics, or robots, would be a big part of the future.  A range of types of robotics was used. The teachers of the future would not be human, but robots.  Also, people said that smart houses would be common, and there would be robots to serve us, or the house itself would have robotic parts (mainly in the kitchen, and with chores around the house).

2)
I used a power point in my presentation to be able to visualize the information.
I will first talk about my topic, and how I came up with the idea.
I will then describe my Materials and Methods:  talk about the survey groups, and the survey questions.
I will then talk about my hypotheses:  what they are and why or how I came up with them. I will go through each of the 4.
 Next I will explain how I analyzed the survey answer (content analysis example).  I will show an actual survey and go through the process.
I will display a table that contains the results of the survey.
I will then discuss whether or not the hypotheses were accepted, and show the evidence that supports that judgement (I will use color coded tables for this).
After going through the hypothesis, I will conclude the presentation with a discussion about other possible factors that influence how people view the future.  I will mention some other research that discusses some of these factors.  I will also talk about some problems that I encountered while doing this investigation.
At the end, I will be open  for questions and comments.

PS: I already did the presentation, but this was the plan anyways...

3) I will  email you the poster slide...

Homework 10...or should it be 9?!?

Q1)

There is no such thing as scientific proof, because science does not seek to prove things.   It seeks to explain things or how they work.  With those explanations, science can disprove or state how things don’t work.  Whereas math is concerned with proving things, science is concerned with gathering evidence.  But having evidence is not the same thing as having proof; proofs are final, and evidence can change (better evidence can be found, evidence for a different theory can be found, etc).

Q2)…I will email you this part…

Q3)

Increased access to information or computing has led to a decrease in privacy and security.  With an increasing number of activities being done via computers (email vs. writing traditional letters, banking or purchasing items online), we open ourselves up to loss of privacy and/or security because we rely on the computing systems to be secure.  This is unfortunately not the case at all times.  Security is lost because personal information such as account numbers, log-ins, and passwords can get into the wrong hands if the systems have been compromised.  Before using computers for these activities, it was much harder to obtain this type of information.

  Privacy can be lost because personal information can be distributed much easier than ever before, essentially with the touch of a button.  A lot of information we deem private, such as emails, photos, etc. can be viewed by millions of people once someone posts it on a blog, their Facebook, etc. and once it is posted, and someone else downloaded it, it is essentially public forever (taking it down from the original site does not guarantee that someone does not have a copy somewhere else). And oftentimes we do not think about the consequences when we send things to our friends.  It is much harder to distribute information in a way that cannot be undone without computers.

I think computing has definitely increased quality of our activities.  It has made things much more convenient and easier.  Instead of having to write and send a letter, getting stamps, and going to the mailbox, all we have to do is sit at a computer, and write an email.  Instead of having to drive to the bank to deposit a check, we can scan it in and send and deposit it electronically.  Instead of having to go to the mall, we can shop online.  The savings in terms of time, and money saved by not having to drive as much, definitely would contribute to an increased quality of live.

I think computers have also contributed to an increase in social connections that one is able to make.  With a computer, one can instantly communicate with people in different locations, some of them far away.  One also can meet people (via Facebook, for example) that ordinarily one would never have been able to meet (people in different states, countries).  Sometimes, these social connections can also lead to new and different job opportunities, or access to education that one would not have gotten otherwise (think online classes, WIMBA, etc…)

Homework 8

1)

I think the show Earth 2100 takes the current (and currently predicted) problems as a basis to present a worst-case scenario vision of the future.

My predictions on things will be up to 2100 would certainly include things like global warming (and the resultant climate change), the scarcity of currently abundant resources, increased population growth, etc.  However, I don’t think that all of these issues are going to come to a head, all at once, and all to the worst degree possible.  I think that all these things might eventually happen, but it will be at a little bit slower pace than the show predicts, since I don’t think it will happen all at once.  I think some of the scenarios they showed, such as the future of Las Vegas, will happen, but this is localized to areas that are already in distress.  I think that other areas will be able to hold on longer than predicted in this show.  Also, I think (or rather, hope) that by that time we will come up with some better solutions to all these issues than are presented in the show.  I think that, as the last part of the show indicated, we will develop and implement some better ways of creating energy and thereby avoiding the worst-case scenario.

2)

This show actually relates to my topic very well, since it is predicting what the future might be like, and that is the same thing I had asked the people in my survey to do.  Of the scenarios proposed by this show, I think most of them were at least mentioned once by the participants in the surveys.

  For example:  several of the 9^th graders predicted that houses would have to be able to float in order to cope with increased flooding in the future.  Also, some mentioned that houses have to be built stronger in order to withstand the more extreme weather (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.).  So the concept of climate change in the future seems to be a very familiar one, at least to the younger group of survey takers. 

The older groups focused more on the need to be energy efficient, and more reliant on alternative resources.  A large portion of people predicted that houses in the future would all be energy efficient, or “green”, the same way this show predicted the apartment Lucy and her family lived in in New York.  Also, the concept of growing your own food was predicted by a couple of survey-takers. Some of the participants also predicted that society might change as a result of scarcity of resources and the extreme and devastating change in climate.  A couple of people mentioned that there would be wars over resources and food, as seen in the show, and that we would live underground to avoid the extreme climate, etc.  Some also proposed that societies would de-volve due to the lack of resources (such as using animal-pulled vehicles).

Several people also had a more positive outlook, comparable to the last portion of the show.  They predicted that in the future, we will be relying on “green” technology, and imply that we will have found ways to create our energy that are sustainable and do not involve fossil fuels.  They talk about how houses will be self-sustaining (using waste to make energy, for example), and smaller.

It seems that people are aware of the problems we will be facing in the future.  Some people are more aware of the difficulties that lie in solving these, and therefore predict a more “bleak” future.  Others are more optimistic and assume that at some point we will have the technology to overcome issues such as resource depletion and energy crisis, and that we will be able to focus our technological advances on providing comfort and convenience.

Homework 7

1.

For this homework, I decided to take a closer look at the butterfly effect. It “bugs” me the most, and  I wanted to learn a little bit more about it because all I knew so far came from different movies that used these phenomenon (and the additional time-travel aspect) to create crazy stories about scientists that travel back in time and (accidentally) step off a laid out path, step on a butterfly,  and then, after they came back to the present, they realize that their future (and present, and past) is changing in waves… (the movie was “A sound of thunder”, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/).  This really disturbs me, not because I intend to travel back in time and step on random insects, but it got me thinking about the everyday things in life that you don’t even think about, and how something very tiny and seemingly unimportant could lead to devastation in the future. (I guess it could lead to peace and prosperity, but that seems hardly anything to worry about).  If you hold the door open for someone, could that somehow lead to a world war in thousands of years?  And not only actions, but how do inventions affect the future?  Did the “invention” of the pencil (or the wheel, buttons, ice cream, car,…) somehow cause WW II???  Or has the effect not yet happened but will, soon?

I looked at several websites to research a little more on this topic, and found interesting information on Lorenz’ wheel (the one we saw videos of in class).  Turns out that when you graph the actions of this seemingly unpredictable wheel, you get a graph that is a spiral or a loop – so the behavior seen in the wheel was not as random as it appeared.  Before this, there were only two kinds of order that were known: periodic behavior and steady state.  The spiral/loop behavior was neither, but since it was still ”order”(it always did the same thing), he discovered a new type of order.  The site goes on talking about other instances where there is some order found in seemingly disorderly situations (e.g. growth rates, cotton price fluctuations,…) (http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html).

So my realization is that one really shouldn't worry too much about what they do and how they do it...because you never know what little thing might set of a chain of events in the future, and maybe by trying NOT to do something, you do exactly the ONE thing needed to set off that event...So I learned that the future is unpredictable, in a very unpredictable way.

Some other sites that I looked at were:

http://www.stsci.edu/~lbradley/seminar/butterfly.html

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-butterfly-effect.htm

http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html

2.

The main principle that would affect my project is (obviously) the observer effect.  Just by me asking the participants, I might have affected how they answer.  Or maybe they write down answers that are not really what they think, but what they think that I want to hear.  I tried to counteract that particular concern by telling them that there are no “right” or “wrong” answers.

I think the butterfly effect might also be applicable:  Maybe by asking a certain person a certain question in this survey today, this could lead to some event in the future that would not have happened otherwise? Maybe the person went home, talked to someone else about the questions and how they answered, which then that person told someone else, who then got the crazy idea to invent a hover-board for us to use for traveling short distances?

External perturbations applies, also, in that the “predictions” for my survey were made not completely knowing “where things are now” and what “outside influence will impinge on the system between now, and next”.  So the predictions are inherently faulty, since not all things were sufficiently taken into consideration (and I was so hoping for those hover-boards to become available soon…).

Homework 6

1) I found that it was hard to locate information specifically geared towards the question of how people of different age groups view the future.  So I ended up searching for future predictions in general, to see what people overall are coming up with when asked, and to get an idea of what kinds of questions to ask.

http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/tl1.html

http://www.lasvegastribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=395:civilization-2500-life-500-years-into-the-future&catid=61:future-talk&Itemid=128

http://www.diceproject.org/pdf/Keynote%20Address%202%20Contesting%20the%20future.pdf

http://www.futureforall.org/whatspossible.htm

http://www.csudh.edu/global_options/IntroFS.HTML#RangeFSViews

2)
Abstract: General Overview of the project and outcome
Introduction:  discuss age groups, state hypothesis/prediction about the outcome of the surveys
Materials and Methods: Discuss the questions i chose (mention related web-sites), who and how i chose the survey group.
Results: discuss answers given in survey, compare answers given by the different groups. Add data table containing all answers
discussion: relate differences/similarities in answers to age groups.  accept/reject hypothesis.  discuss the outcome, possible flaws, other things to consider, extensions possibilities for future projects

3. I incorporated the background research  that I did in the Materials and Methods section, since that is where I will be discussing the questions and the survey groups I chose in more detail.

I might incorporate and cite the resarch in the discussion section, as well, as it applies to my findings. 

Abstract: General Overview of the project and outcome
Introduction:  discuss age groups, state hypothesis/prediction about the outcome of the surveys
Materials and Methods: I have chosen to ask 7 questions about the participant's view of the future.  I chose an open answer type set-up, as to minimize the degree to which I was leading the answers.  I did not want the participants to chose which one of "my scenarios" they thought most likely.  I researched on the internet the types of views about the future.  I wanted to chose topics in my questions that people might already have an opinion about.  I wanted them to be able to relate to the questions so they could give their actual opinion.
I used several internet sites to get a better understanding of what questions to ask, and what I should expect from the answers.
http://www.csudh.edu/global_options/IntroFS.HTML#RangeFSViews discusses ranges and characteristics of different views of the future.
http://www.diceproject.org/pdf/Keynote%20Address%202%20Contesting%20the%20future.pdf mentions that women have different views of the future, and talks about student's preferred futures.
http://www.lasvegastribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=395:civilization-2500-life-500-years-into-the-future&catid=61:future-talk&Itemid=128 gave me general ideas what topics people might be thinking about when they think about the future. 

Results: discuss answers given in survey, compare answers given by the different groups. Add data table containing all answers
discussion: relate differences/similarities in answers to age groups.  accept/reject hypothesis.  discuss the outcome, possible flaws, other things to consider, extensions possibilities for future projects