CLT

The CLT is located in the first floor of the library. There you can find many computers, Macs and PC's. The center is divided in areas that are specialized in various things, for instance there are computers that have special softwares for adio editting, others that are in charge of graphing and many other things. Also, in the CLT you can borrow all sorts of technological equipment such as camareas, headphones, video cameras.
They also have a conference room where they can connect to any place in the world through the TV system. They can be communicated with 15 different systems of these at the same time.
This center is helpful to students that are working in projects and want or need to involve specialized technologies to their research. In my case I have used the scanners there, and they work pretty fast and really good.
The CLT is a great location on campus to learn things about softwares.

Excel

During the course I have learned many things about Excel that I did not know before. I used to have a lot of difficulties while trying to work with this program but now I have realized that it is not as bad as it seemed. I like the way it organizes everything as well as all the calculations it can do in very little time.
I also like all the fromats of style that are availabe. I think it is a great way to keep track of many things such as personal expenses. I also think that sometimes it is hard to work with because there are many things that we have to memorize in terms of functions.
However, I think it is a pretty good program.

Image Manipulation

I chose this image because I consider that the way that media changes the human figure is shocking. Images like this one are one of the main factors that cause psychological problems on people. For instance, this image can casue many people to want to change their personal appearance and this decision can take them to become anorexics. This is a CBS picture that apperared in a magazine. The picture from the left side was rejected and therefore they created the false picture you see on the rigth. The manipulation of the photo is considerable because they made the woman look many sizes below her own. I think that the purpose of manipulating photos in terms of physical appearance can best be explained by the popularity that the advertisement will have on people. If the person that they are showing looks nice and thin and pretty, the impact on the population will be higher. I consider that this manipulation is harmful because, in this case, a lot of women around the age of the lady in the picture can feel disapointed on their own image without knowing that this celebrity isn't as slim as she seems. People should now and realize that not everything the media shows us is truthful or real.

I chose this video because it shows us how all the beauty companies trick our eyes and our minds in thinking that supermodels exist. It is not true, they are all normal and average human beings that go through a process of image manipulation thanks to Photoshop. It is very shocking to see how the aspect of a person can change so dramatically. It is almost as if the after image depicts a different person.


This another video that shows a girl that is stereotyped as "ugly" and is turned into what we stereotype as "pretty". It shows again a complete different person. And it also shows the amazing changes that photoshop can do.

Internet: A threat to some lives...

The transition from a not so technological developed world to a very developed technological world was determined in great part by the creation of what we call Internet. Since its appearance, every human being became dependant on the Internet; companies began to merge into the Internet involving their clients to form part of their businesses through the Internet. With time, Internet was available not only in computers but also in many other electronic devices such as cell phones. People began to have access to it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Internet became a necessity in human beings’ lives.
What would happen if the Internet was to be removed from the world only for a day or even for a couple of hours? If this happened, the world would paralyze, people all over the world would lack communication and would be uniformed. Like everything in the world, the Internet has benefits as well as disadvantages. It can be considered as a great tool for achieving information but people must be careful while using the Internet because every person is able to upload the information they wish to share with no restrictions at all.
In the Internet, limits for achieving knowledge or information of any sort do not exist. Everything that the human mind may imagine is found in the Internet. Many people would support the idea that is great and awesome to have access to information of any type, at anytime, anywhere.
But, what would you think about the Internet if you were the parent of a psychologically damaged teenage girl who committed suicide by following instructions from a first-year medical student who posted an entry in his blog post on how to help terminal ill people to commit suicide? You would not consider the Internet as a positive influence over the world. And, would you have someone to blame for the death of your daughter?
Internet represents a great threat to every person that accesses it. For people like the girl in the case, that have mental and psychological problems, the Internet can represent death itself. This mentally ill girl decided to take away her life, and the Internet became her main ally. We must be very careful with the information we acquire from the web. As it was mentioned before, the Internet is an unrestricted and unlimited communication network where anyone can express or share anything.
Let us consider this case a little closer. If we take an ethical, bioethical, and even a legal (depending on the country) point of view, we would conclude that suicide is a crime. Bioethically, human beings do not have the right to take their lives away from themselves. An individual cannot decide whether to remain alive or not, death must come naturally. Now, if a person has a terminal illness, euthanasia may be possible under a physician’s responsibility and care, and depending on the country and state law. It is important to mention that euthanasia and suicide is not the same thing. Euthanasia “refers to the practice of ending a life in a manner which relieves pain and suffering" and suicide “is the act of a human being intentionally causing his or her own death”.
Suicide is considered to be a crime; therefore, the teenage girl was in some part responsible for the illegal act. But curiously, assisting suicide is also a crime, and this is what the first-year medical student did by uploading information of this sort to the Internet while not being a certified physician and at the same time violating an ethical and moral code. This makes this student highly responsible for the death of this girl. And, what about the weblog content provider? He is also considered guilty by allowing this type of information in blog posts. It is true that free self-expression is a right that all individuals have in the United States, but ethics and moral occupy higher standards because the main goal of people according to bioethics is to promote and take care of humans’ lives.
It is extremely hard, if not impossible, to control the information that makes the Internet. One solution is to educate people on how to have access to appropriate and safe information in the Internet. In this case, I think that students, from the moment they enter medical school they should be obliged to follow an ethical code that if they violate it, they would no longer be able to continue with the medical career.
Parents should try to be more aware of the web pages that their children are visiting especially if their child is mentally ill. Web pages that involve threat should be blocked for at least minors.
In any case, we cannot avoid the use of Internet, but what we can do is to try to be more careful with the information we access. If we want to share something with the world through the Internet we must be conscious of the consequences that our information represents for every person in the world.


"Euthanasia." Wikipedia. N.p., 06/02/2011. Web. 11 Feb 2011. .


"Suicide." Wikipedia. N.p., 09/02/11. Web. 11 Feb 2011. .

Copyright and Create Commons

During Jason Hardin’s lecture I learend many important details about Copyright laws in the United States. What I want to talk about in this entry is about Fair Use. Fair Use allows people to take certain parts of intelectual property and use it in a good way. By good I mean that this information is not to gain profit, it is not extensive, and mainy it is educational. In order to apply a Fair Use, four factors must be considered: 1. The Purpose of the reproduction, which can be education, 2. The Nature of the reproduced work, which involves information about the property you are copying from, 3. The Amount of the reproduction, which means that you cannot copy an entire book and say it is Fair Use, if you copy a small portion of a book as a quote, then it is considered as Fair Use, and 4. The Effect on the market for the work, if you are using Fair Use, you should not be making profit for that piece of information. It is important to mention that information that comes from the government is easier to copy because they provide this information to inform people and not to make a profit.
I think that Fair Use is good for society but we must be sure that we are doing it correctly. Also, I think that Fair Use is necesary because individuals need information all the time, and cannot contact every single person form which they use information.
As a conclusion, we must be very aware of the things we do in terms of Copyright because it is someting very serious that if we do not follow the rules we can get in trouble with the law.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.