Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2017

Kids and Technology

First of all, welcome back! My hope is that everyone had a great Thanksgiving as well as Black Friday if you are one of those with the courage to get up early and brave the crowd. For those who prefer sleep and lack-of-injury, I hope you individuals are ready for the joy of Black Friday from the comfort of home (or work): Black Friday. Now to the topic at hand, and for the purpose of argument, I am going to use my (future) brother-in-law as they are the perfect age for this topic. Kids today (at least those under the age of 10) have been born and raised entirely in the age of connected devices and handheld technology. On most occasions, I have witnessed that the two I mentioned earlier cannot be seen inside without a device in their hands. Whether they are using the restroom, eating dinner, et cetera, these kids have a phone/tablet/iPod in their hand playing some game or watching some video. For these reasons, and I am just assuming many kids are like this, we tend to generalize this

Self-Driving Cars

The future of the world seems to be autonomous. We have reached a point that the future is going to be in Artificial Intelligence; Google has even said they are an AI-first company. The idea behind this push is for machines to learn and adapt to our needs. We want machines to work easily for us. One category of machines that is being pushed to work for us (and without us) is automobiles. Even when transportation consisted of horses pulling a buggy, humans have always been "behind the wheel". By that, I mean that humans have always controlled where, when, why, and how a vehicle will be moving. We have now reached a point where the future will consist of cars that control speed and direction without the need for human control. Aside from convenience, the main reason for the push: removing human error. It is no surprise that the vast majority of automobile accidents can be traced back to human error. Whether it is not watching the road, driving too fast, or simple reckless b

Trust Indicators and Fake News

It is no secret that we have a significant "Fake News" problem in the world today. Before everyone starts preparing their defenses for their favorite news sources, let me clarify that I am not talking about "Biased News". As much as President Trump likes to say it, CNN is not actually "Fake News" and neither is FOX, NBC, ABC, et cetera. Biased as these sites may be at times (mostly all the time), the news they are reporting is based in fact; it just has a very biased spin. I would think that functioning adults would be able to tell the difference between: "Trump signs healthcare reform in to law causing issues for middle-class" and "Trump seen punching babies on his way out of gentleman's club" While there is no way for me to know if the second statement ever happened (I highly doubt it), I would assume that most people would understand that one is fake and one is biased. Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a point that peop

The Circle and a Transparent World

Welcome to my new page. I have noticed that on most of my posts (at least on the old blog) that I am getting views, but I am not seeing a lot of comments and discussion. I am thinking this has more to do with the format of the posts rather than a lack of opinions from others; everyone has an opinion these days. So, I am going to start with this post to see if we can get a little more interaction. This weekend I finally got around to seeing The Circle (a movie I have wanted to see a while back). For those who have not seen the movie yet, I will give you a basic run-down. The magical Emma Watson (pun intended) begins working at a technology company that is basically working to make the world entirely connected, visible, and interactive; their methods for attempting this (cameras everywhere, guerrilla-style searching) are quite invasive. While I found the movie to be incredibly far-fetched and not well hashed-out, there was one part that really had me thinking. In the movie, Watson