Is this OK for your mom to read?

Googling your name is always something fun to do, but have you ever really thought about how you appear to other people?  I just googled my name and found a Xanga site that I completely forgot about, and not to mention had a link to a webshots pages I had also forgotten I had ever created, a volleyball player at Catholic University named Katie Acuff, a web site that I had created for a class when I was in 6th grade, and some other random irrelevant links.  

The site that I had made when I was in 6th grade is called "The Mystery of History" and is an unfinished.  I highly doubt that this page would ever be usable information for potential employers.  However, the Xanga site is a little bit more incriminating.  After reading through some of the posts, I realized that I had written this when I was a sophomore in high school.  It's very embarrassing to read some of the things I posted.  There was one entry where I talked about how I was always getting grounded, how my mom thought that I was a pathological liar, I used to sneak out of the house and more...not something that I want my potential employees to think.  I don't know how seriously companies would take a Xanga site from sophomore in high school but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of them turning it against me.  If companies will use a Facebook picture from 10 years ago against a potential employee, why not use my Xanga site?  Although I have not touched my Xanga site in years, it still comes up on Google before my IT blog, which I have been updating at least once a week. 

It seems to have become a necessity for presidential candidates to make a list of everything that they have ever done and admit to them before incriminating evidence is found and brought up in a press conference.  Any information that can be found will be used against them if possible.  If Barack Obama can be a potential president of the United States after admitting to the use of cocaine, businesses should be able to look past a ten year old scandalous picture from Facebook.  

However, we cannot assume that information published online will not be used against us even if it is old.  It is clearly happening either way.  Hiring someone to review everything online that can be accessed by the public is definitely not a bad way to go.  Reputation Defender seems like a good choice for anyone interviewing for a job.  It is not a bad idea for anyone in any organization to make sure that everything published on the internet about themselves is something that they don't mind being seen by their mothers and grandmothers, usually a good rule of thumb.

Addicted to the internet

Creating a cybertwin sounds slightly ridiculous to me.  However, I also have not entered the world of online dating and am not too enthralled with the social phenomenon of my generation, Facebook and MySpace.  I'm not going to lie, I do visit Facebook every few days but I definitely do not rely on it.  My friends will leave me messages and I might  not get to writing on their wall for almost a week...if ever.

The idea of creating a twin in the internet world does not surprise me or excite me.  It is an interesting idea but it is nothing that I would ever do.  Why create a personality online so that you can be there one hundred percent of the time  This is where the world is becoming too addicted to the computer and uses it a san escape from being a normal social human being.  As I posted in an earlier entry, I do not think that the internet is causing people to have less useful knowledge than earlier years, but i do think that if people really create cyber twins, it is a complete possibility.

Creating a cuber twin would mean that every time you come back to the computer you have to review the conversations that occurred while you were gone.  The computer could misrepresent yourself and there would be no way to undo it.  I am very skeptical of this new idea.  I feel like people would begin to not worry enough about how they present themselves in their day to day life and begin to spend even more of their lives staring at a computer screen.  Would people know if they were talking to a twin and not a real person?  Would there be extra safety precautions to prevent sexual predators from creating a cyber twin?

Also, there are more than five personalities that a person could have.  The new program only "lets people pick one of five basic personalities, such as "warm-hearted, intellectual" or "cheeky, down to earth,"and then have that choice act as a proxy to friends or strangers."  This program has not been developed enough and through through.  There is a potential for success but with the internet crazed crazies in the world but there is also a large potential for unsafe operations.

The description of the article about Cybertwins is, "If spending too much time online turns you into your evil twin, then it might be time for a "cybertwin.""  This subheading is a false thought in my opinion.  The idea of the cybertwin only allows the people who have to go to work on a day to day basis to be online every hour of every day.  This will turn people into being obsessive about the internet, every day only looking forward to getting home to read the conversations that went on while they were at work.   This program would cause people to become even more addicted to the internet than they already are.

YouTube Post

This is my friend Landon Austin and his new music video!
You can download this song on iTunes.

Are you smarter than a 5th grader?

Shows such as 'Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?' exist and appear on television often proving that 5th graders know their history and simple facts better than the average adult in the U.S.  Adults in the U.S. should definitely re-read their 5th grade history books and flip on the news slightly more often.  Why are these 5th graders appearing smarter than the average adult?  What is the difference between how children today grow up and how their parents grew up?  The availability of information on the internet.  

 If anyone has ever tried to set their grandparents or even parents up on AOL Instant Messenger they know that the internet is teaching our children many technical skills.  Both of my parents are teachers and use computers quite often yet I am still the go to person when it comes to using the computer for anything other than the basic word processing and excel.  Adding attachments to e-mails and imbedding objects in word are still not fully in my parents repertoire while it comes second nature to new generations.  I first got AIM when I was in 7th grade and as years go by children are getting connected much earlier. 

The internet is comfortably placed as a resource for information.  Home pages make it so that it is almost impossible to ignore everything going on in the world.  Headlines catch your eye and you want to learn more.  In order to get information from the newspaper, you have to deliberately pick the newspaper up every day.  However, the internet is used daily and users can learn information without going out of their way or taking time out of their busy schedules.  The internet and computers ARE today's culture.  Children have been blessed with new fun ways of learning.  All you need to do is set a child at a computer with Mavis Beacon and they get to learn to type while playing games at the same time.  The internet is helping children today learn more about the world instead of holding them back, what other way can you explain 5th graders beating out adults in trivia questions?  

  

NikeID is part of a new wave of customization where the customer is in charge of what they chose to buy.  While customization is not a brand new idea, it is still new for the public as a whole.  Before NikeID only people with a high status could customize their clothes.  The real question here is whether it actually makes money for the companies or if it is more of an advertising scheme.  A customer could go into the store in New York with the intention to design their own show and upon realizing that it might be a month before they receive the shoe, they might take a look around the store to decide if there is something else that they like better.  

Busy Work

Busy work.  We all hate it but somehow it pays off in the end.  When I read the article from the New York Times entitled 'Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans,' I was intrigued enough to investigate it on my own.  After tons of confusing instructional pages, I was finally registered to complete my own hits.  I was able to create my own prepaid HITS on Mechanical Turk, but I have no need for that.  I thumbed around for a good twenty minutes before I finally found the list of needed HITS.  The first one sounded fun, it was titled 'Make A Drawing.'  The entry looked like this:

Make a drawing.

Requester: draw HIT Expiration Date: Feb 26, 2008 (3 weeks 1 day) Reward: $0.01

Time Allotted: 2 hours             HITs Available: 1688

Description: Create an image that looks like another image.

Qualifications Required: None

An image came up and I attempted to recreate it using an online program similar to the most simplistic version of Paint possible.  Although I do not understand the point of the program I did, I do understand how it is difficult for a computer to re-create and how pointless it would be for a highly paid executive to perform this task.  Although that particular HIT did not make sense, others were a little bit more reasonable.  For example.  Another HIT asked you to create random questions for a survey page.  The link was given and subsequently a topic was given for the random questions.  

Mechanical Turk seemed like it would be something that I would enjoy.  I really enjoy playing with computers and learning new things on the computer.  However, it turned out to be busy work that would never interest me.  Although I should have gone through more options, but for some reason I just didn't see the point.  For every 15 minutes or so I could earn one whole cent.  Ok, well maybe I could even earn 7 cents, but my time is worth more than less than one cent a minute.  I think that Mechanical Turk is a good idea but may not be executed correctly.  It is definitely smarter to have people do small jobs but I just can't imagine many people doing the tasks voluntarily, especially when they only make a cent for 15 minutes of their time.  I am curious of how people are attracted to the site.  Busy work has never been fun homework, how can people actually chose to do it at random?  While allocating these jobs to the public is a smart idea, I wonder if there is a better way to encourage activity in it.  I definitely had never heard of it before I read the article.  Have you?