Group Presentation

This blog post is about one of the presentations that the class had, specifically the one on Virtual Reality. To me, virtual reality is a super cool technology that is up and coming which allows people to experience things that have never been experienced before.  Basically Virtual Reality is an interactive computer-generated experience which simulates the real world and sends the information to a headset or mobile phone. Some of the things the presentation talked about in particular that I found interesting were AR and MR, which I had never heard of before. AR stands for Augmented Reality and MR stands for Mixed Reality. Augmented Reality is when the virtual world is augmented through multiple senses, such as visual, auditory, etc. I found AR to be very interesting because of the way that it looks. In my eyes, AR looks very futuristic, almost like it never should be found in real life, something that is only in movies. The last reality he talked about in his presentation was MR. Mixed Reality which merges the real and virtual worlds together, somewhere in between both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Some places that you can find virtual reality was also interesting to me. Apparently, people use virtual reality to make architecture, using engines like the Unreal Engine. It is also used in gaming, using VR headsets such as the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift. These VR headsets is what i am most familiar with, because they are talked about quite a bit in the gaming world, as many people predict it to be the next big thing.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence really is a spectacular thing. When people talk about how the world will look like in the future with flying cars and robots, this is what they mean. Artificial Intelligence really has the kick to allow these types of things to happen in the future, and even in today's time's. The biggest example I can think of a robot in today's society is Sophia. Sophia is all over the news, and even goes on talk shows. She really is the big thing of this year, and it's quite incredible what she can do. The coolest part about her in my opinion is that she even has her own Twitter account that she actually posts tweets on. There are some downsides to Artificial Intelligence too though, of course. The biggest one being disintermediation. Having robots able to do jobs that real people did before, removes many jobs from the field, but at the same time opens up many different jobs to maintain and provide maintenance to the bots. Many customer service assisstants and such are actually bots themselves, which is kind of shocking sometimes, because some of the bots really act like real people, and some people would never even know that they were bots in the first place. Overall artificial intelligence is really growing and becoming more and more advanced every year, and I am very interested on what will be happening technologically 10 years from now because of the uses of Artificial Intelligence.

Startup.com

This documentary was really interesting for me. Basically this documentary was about three friends, Kaleil, Tom, and Chieh, starting a business for an internet company. They wanted to become rich off of this company. At first, they struggled with the name, but eventually settled with the name GovWorks.com. This website primarily allowed you to pay your parking tickets online, using their website. During the development process of the company, they seem to struggle with the third friend, Chieh, not cooperating and committing to the business. At this point, they decide to remove him from the company. It was very stressful for them, Kaleil being the CEO and Tom being the co-CEO, because it put a lot of stress on both their business relationships, and their personal relationship, which they have had since they were in high school. Tom also had a daughter, which being a part of the business really neglected time spent with his daughter. During the creation of the website, Tom running the tech side of things, their seems to be many problems, almost as if during the creation of the business, they never really thought about the logistics of making the website itself. That on top of having competition that was launched faster and more complete, the company was in a lot of stress and had a lot of problems. At this point Tom did not care much about the business anymore, and seemed to want a way out of it, which forced Kaleil to have to let him go from the company, which was overall good for the company, but bad for Kaleil and Tom's personal relationship. Overall, I really enjoyed this documentary, as it showed a lot of ups and downs of the dot com boom and bust, and showed how stressful and hard running a business can really be.

Dot Com to Dot Bomb

The dot com to dot bomb era was an incredible time period in an economy standpoint. Basically the dot com to dot bomb era was a time where internet companies were started, and were thriving in the market, to the point where there were too many companies thriving, which caused the "dot bomb", where the market crashed hard, and many many companies went bankrupt, and many people lost their jobs. In the start many companies were first starting up, like CompuServ, and they were profiting very well. After that, more companies such as Yahoo came into the picture, and they were also doing very well for themselves. These companies that were also doing well got to the point where they were doing so well that they started to buy some of the other companies. One example of this is AOL buying CompuServ. After this happened, that is when the "bust" of the market happened. The stockmarket hits a huge decline because of the many internet companies beginning to fail, like Pets.com. A multitude of companies at this point were starting to go bankrupt. After all of this happened, the internet had to make a comeback, which definitely took some time to repair, because of how volatile the market for the internet had just been during this era.

Guest Speaker Erik Hanberg

I had a great time listening to our guest speaker, Erik Hanberg, speak about how technology is used in his line of work and how it has fueled his successes. Some of the most interesting things that he has done are the network of Tacoma podcasts, and his own books that he has written. It is very cool to me that throughout his career he has done what this course has mainly been about, "Living and Working in a Virtual World". It is really crazy to think that as an author, he has been able to make a living selling his books online, and only being printed when needed to. This is helpful for him because he does not have to make more copies than what may be needed. He also talked about the Thousand True Fans book, and how it helped inspire and influence him to become an author, which I thought was pretty neat. A few other things I was curious about was how he ran the podcasts, such as how much money he was making on the podcasts, and if they were still regularly bought years down the line, like his books are. A few final thoughts I had about the whole event was that it really kind of motivated me to go after what I really want in life, like Erik did, and to keep working at it to eventually succeed at it. He wasn't always a writer and author, even though he always wanted to be, but he put in the work and eventually was able to live his dream.

A General Topic I Would Like to Report on

A general topic i would like to report on by the end of the quarter is probably artificial intelligence. Over the years, machines have evolved a lot, and with them, artificial intelligence have as well. Many new phenomenons happen every year, for example the painting that was painted using only AI. There are many new discoveries made using AI and technology advances so much every year that it would be interesting to see how far AI has come within the next 10 to 20 years. It's really interesting to think about what AI could do in a few years, because of how rapidly it advances. AI is also very useful because of the ability to solve problems in computer science, and software engineering. It would be very cool to see what advances could be made in computer science in the future, using AI. I also think it would be fun to do a report on AI because I do not know that much about it. AI is one of those things that many people know or have heard about, but not many know the specifics within AI, and it would be able to go into more depth on what AI actually is and accomplishes. I would also like to look at how Artificial Intelligence is used in video games, as it is becoming more advanced in the video game world as well. Many animals, people, etc. in video games today seem to be a lot more realistic than the past, and I am also interested to see how video games look in the future with more advanced knowledge of Artificial Intelligence.

Where is Journalism Going?

Where is journalism going? That is a hard question to answer because there is no definitive direction it is going, because journalism is always changing. There are some things going on in today's journalism that are going in the wrong direction, but at the same time technology is becoming more and more advanced everyday, which allows journalism to become more advanced aswell. One of the most prominent habits going on in today's journalism is writer bias. Many journalists are not neutral to the news being presented, and will present the news in a certain way to favor their viewpoints. This causes many news sources to become unreliable, which is the last thing you would want from journalism. The biggest example of this that I can think of would have to be the most popular news stations, CNN and FOX. CNN has mostly left-leaning viewers, so the news is delivered bias towards the left, and FOX has mostly right-leaning viewers, so the news is delivered bias towards the right. There are many good things happening with today's journalism aswell. Technology is becoming way more advanced, which allows news to be spread across the globe very quickly, with many news stations having live reports. This can be a very good thing because of the urgency of certain news. Another good thing about today's journalism is there are many sources of journalism today. In the past, you got almost all of your news from either newspaper, or radio. Now there are many different sources to choose from, such as TV and internet.