I Hope This Stays Up Long Enough To Get Graded

Fire Power

The technology available to us today is an incredibly powerful tool for connecting people, but just like any tool, it can be used for many different purposes. Fire is incredibly useful in survival situations, can be quite destructive, and enhances recreation when camping. Similarly social media can be used for good, bad, and indifferent ends. Some of the dangers of social media include the fact that some degree of your information is available to the public and therefore vulnerable to identity thieves. Many people use social media to spread viruses for those who are not careful. Some people use social media to completely replace a normal healthy social life. There needs to be a balance in using social media, and all of these dangers should be avoided.

There are also many positive effects of social media. Most of these effects have to do with the fact that people are able to connect in ways and with people that they would not otherwise have access to. People can unite for shared causes and really make a change if enough people get involved. This self-organization can happen without an influence other than the people who want to connect reaching out to others. While this effect is well worth the risks, mostly social networking is used for purposes that are not inherently good or bad. Flash mobs can be organized using social media, but while they do not set out to hurt anyone, they don’t set out to accomplish anything either. Most people just use social networking for fun, and don’t get involved in any major causes further than occasionally liking a post. Social media can be a very powerful tool, but for the most part that’s not how it’s used.

Nerdier Than Thou

Research on why women do not choose computer science seems to point to the fact that women can feel threatened by science fiction and gaming related interests of others in the field. This seemed very strange based on my group of friends. This group is not a random sampling of the population, but many of my friends that are women are nerdier than many computer scientists I know. I did a quick survey of my Facebook feed to test if this observation was supportable and found that three times as many science fiction or gaming posts on my feed were generated by women than men in the last few days. Many of the women generating these posts are in other scientific fields. None are fellow computer scientists. Why are these women who are obviously not intimidated by science fiction and gaming culture still not choosing computer science?

The Source of Success

                The kinds of people that contribute to open-source software are the reason for its success. They self-motivate by definition; they start off contributing without compensation during their own free time. With this volunteer mentality also comes an inherent interest in the project they are working on, they chose to work on it in the first place. This interest not only fuels quality work, it encourages interaction with other contributors and gets them sharing and seeing many different styles of programming. Often sharing work in this way takes a thick skin when a contributor sees just how horrible their programming was, but this only encourages further improvement when taken the right way. Without programmers like these, Open source software would be dead. 

Missionary Digitization

New technologies have elicited a huge change in how the church is run. Many of these changes can be seen in missionary work, often with the same technology that was discouraged a short time ago. Missionaries are now allowed and encouraged to use Facebook and other social medial to further the work. Five years ago emailing home was a privilege for missionaries and time spent using this technology was very limited. Although social media was already well established by this point, going to any website that was not directly run by the church was prohibited (not even third party email). These policies were understandable; the internet can be a dangerous place if you are not careful. More and more of the missionary force made up of people who don’t know a world without these technologies. With this tech savvy missionaries can make these tools become very powerful while avoiding their spiritual dangers.

Legal Mumbo Jumbo

It is well known; there is a problem with the current system of patenting software. When there are companies whose sole income is suing and threatening to sue other companies based on these patents, it is intuitive that something is not right. What does that say about the legal system in general where this kind of problem can develop? Costs of these kinds of lawsuits are enough to put a small company out of business, and that’s if they win. There should be some kind of limit to these fees in these and other types of cases. The common image of a lawyer in our current legal system is that of a liar, someone who would do anything for a client if they are paid well enough. There should be some kind of incentive for lawyers to back away from clients that have no real case, but this may only drive up the price for these kinds of lawyers. The patent system along with the entire legal system has deep issues that will take time and enormous effort to resolve.