Eric's Weblog

NO! Don't think about it like that! What I am trying to say is that all that I could think about was how cool today's presentation on Cyber Security was and how I am totally glad that I am taking SRA 111 next semester. What I can't forget is the quote he ended on, but sadly, from the time I left the Stadium to the time I got to my room, I completely forgot what he said, but I know that he was trying to say. It referred to an empire that had built many roads because it wanted to expand, while at the same time building the most powerful walls they could. But because of their many roads, their many enemies came down these various roads and were able to take them over. And I believe he was comparing the roads as the various access the internet has, as well as the dangers that lurk with that type of ability.

I also found it rather interesting when FBI director Robert Mueller kept avoiding certain questions and when he told us upfront that he was not able to speak on whatever topic was being asked to discussed. He probably felt cool just saying those words. Hopefully one day, maybe I will get the opportunity to say those words, and hopefully I won't get shot right after saying it

Ever wonder what kind of spy gadgets are actually real or not after watching the 007 movies??? Well thanks to this site, hopefully it'll clear some things up. The products they have here are completely stunning. There are a a lot of cool stuff like wireless microphones that are so tiny that it's nearly impossible to detect. They also sell stuff like a bomb jammer which disables radio controlled explosive devices. Just imagine buying these things and going on your own mission. Well I am not doing that at all, but if you feel like you wanna save the world, here's your chance.

Team Wintermute- Matt M., Paul L., Eric H., Martha D.

The subject we chose for our video project was faculty member Dr. Gerry Santoro, professor in the IST/SRA departments. The reason this was chosen was because Matt and Martha have Gerry as a professor for SRA 111 and thought he would be a good choice for a faculty member biography. This was unique from the other group because no other group did a biographical type project.

In order to create a biographical-style video, we realized that we were going to need to interview him with prepared questions and a sense of what we would want to include in our video. We created a general diagram illustrating the topics we wanted to cover, and Gerry’s life in chronological order. This was made to help us figure out where necessary information and data within the video was located, in addition to helping us create a storyboard for the editing process.

We discussed the sort of video we wanted to create, and what we wanted to include. The style we were going for was modeled after a VH1 pop culture production. The interview would be cut and chopped up according to the way we wanted to present the material recorded of Gerry speaking. We would use his personal videos and images as visuals during part of the time that we spoke to illustrate exactly what he was referring to in his interview.

We weren’t sure exactly how Gerry was going to answer the questions we were going to ask him, so we asked more than we knew we’d be using, just to cover all our bases and have enough material. We asked him questions about his entire life story, his early influences, his education, work, research, teaching and personal interests. Gerry enthusiastically answered everything and provided us with an hour’s worth of material.

The Storyboard required a lot of time and energy from our group. We had so much video to get rid of, simply because we could not fit it all, that we had to be sure that what we included counted. We spent the better part of six hours in total working on the storyboard alone.

After a general introduction of the group and our subject, Gerry Santoro, in the first and second blocks, we decided to begin the video with the lesser known facts about this well known professor. In the third block of the storyboard, Paul introduces a little background history of Gerry’s origins, and then we placed clips of our interview with Gerry in an order that brought to light his hobbies and interests, such as Astronomy, Harley Davidson bikes, guitar, and comic books. Moving toward his research, we linked his interests with the technology he works with in the fourth block. Gerry talks about recording video of his bike rides and making covers using multi-track layering software of a famous song. After "the hook", if you will, we start to show Gerry talking about his research in the fifth block, introduced formally by Eric. Gerry talks about technology and pop culture, virtual worlds, and the Web2.0 phenomenon. In the sixth block, we talk to Gerry about his teaching methods and what he thinks makes a good teacher. The seventh and final block, composed of the credits and Imagine by John Lennon, ends the presentation with a quote of Gerry's; that he enjoys dreaming of what can be.

In our video imaging project, we used different types of technological devices in order to completely finish our video. Since none of us had a video camera, we went to the Media Lab in the Willard Building and took out one of their video cameras for a week. This camera was compact and very easy to use, and had a touch screen panel. In addition, we also got a camera to help document the process. Once we had our necessary film, we needed to work on the storyboard to aid the editing.

We used iMovie as our video editing program on Martha’s MacBook Pro. Because we did all of our editing on a lap top, our project was permitted to be portable. In order to work on our movie, we needed two computers, and to exchange the information between those computers, we used Matt’s 160 GB external hard-drive, email and multiple flash drives.

Video Script (interview not scripted due to length- rather than type out entire script, we decided to use a brief summary to describe the dialogue. Narration includes typing and vocals.)

Narration: "Who is the real Gerry Santoro?"

Paul: "Since he was a child in Blanux, Pennsylvania, Gerry’s personal interests have influenced his professional research within the realm of information science and technology."

( Gerry answering question about personal life and interests )

Narration: "How Gerry relates technology to his personal interests..

( Gerry talks about using technology and his communities )

Narration: "Gerry’s research includes.."

Eric: "According to Gerry, his professional research includes social informatics, computer-mediated communication, technology policy and future policies."

( Gerry talking about his research: computer-mediated communication, Web2.0 and virtual worlds )

Narration: "What about your teaching? What makes a great teacher?"

( Gerry discusses teaching techniques and what he incorporates them into his classes )

Problems/ Issues

Initially, we didn’t know how long we would be able to take out the camera for, and our interview date wasn’t set. The indefinite dates made the beginning process difficult and frustrating because of all of our other group work.

Taping the material for our video project went smoothly, but we ended up with an hour’s worth of useful, relevant information. Many issues stemmed from this. First, we had to organize the video into clips in order to find anything in the recording. Second, choosing which clips we would use for the time limit down from the original hour took an enormous time. This was facilitated by the storyboard, but as mentioned, the storyboard took over six hours to create and perfect. Thirdly, Gerry gave us plenty of material, but a lot of it we decided wasn’t going to be relevant to our project and time frame. We spent a good deal of time mashing clips to create thought-provoking and coherent new clips from sometimes long or irrelevant material.

We started the project too close to its deadline, and because of this, we spent almost all week and everyday working as a group on it. Due to the intensity of this project, we all have a good portion of Gerry’s hour long dialogue memorized. All in all, we feel this project was worth too little credit in comparison with the amount of work we put in.

Paul had experience with windows video editing software called Nero. Although the group decided iMovie would be better for the task at hand, in retrospect it might have saved us vital editing time if we had a member of the team intimately aware of the program. Using Nero could have saved us some time, because Paul’s computer has more processing power and capability to handle large files than Martha’s laptop.

That said, there is great value in becoming part of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Like our blogs, this project allowed us to explore our creativity and share it with the world using YouTube. It may have been a lot of work, but we are pleased with the final result.

Resources

Gerry Santoro. Personal Interview. 04 November 2007.

Home Page for Gerry Santoro. Gerry Santoro. Pennsylvania State University.
02 November 2007.

* Matt rented the camera
* all of us were present for the interview
* Martha and Paul created the final storyboard
* All members contributed to where certain clips should be placed within the video
* Matt is responsible for all video effects in our movie, and for doing the actual editing to Team Wintermute's specifications
* Martha compiled final paper
* The parts of the paper were written by either Martha, Eric, or Paul, with Martha being the predominant writer
* Eric compiled information from the web posted about Gerry Santoro

The Final Movie

Yesterday was the day I registered for classes for the spring semester. After the Video Image Project and my newfound interest in SRA, I couldn't wait to sign up for SRA 111 with Gerry Santoro. Unfortunately, Mr. Santoro will not be teaching SRA 111 for the Spring semester which really killed my spirits, but still am glad to take SRA 111. According to the decription page at the scheduling of classing website at http://schedule.psu.edu/soc/spring/up/p-z/sra.html#111, it says:

Introduction to Security and Risk Analysis is a preliminary course with a broad focus, spanning the areas of security, risk and analysis. In addition to familiarizing the student with basic technical terminology, it will also touch upon social and legal issues, risk analysis and mitigation, crime intelligence and forensics, and information warfare and assurance.

This course will motivate students to understand the requirements for security in any government agency or business organization through the use of case studies. Included in this segment are cases related to cyberterrorism, bioterrorism, and critical infrastructure protection. Some concepts to be covered in the area of information security are: confidentiality, integrity, availability, and non-repudiation. Various methods of safeguarding these security concerns will be discussed, such as: single- and multi-factor authentication, encryption, digital signatures, prevention of denial of service attacks, and so forth. This course also covers social and legal issues related to security, in particular identity theft and social engineering. Topics in this section include identity theft, spam, spyware, and adware. This course also covers the principles and the approaches to risk analysis. Here students study vulnerability analysis, crime and intelligence analysis, forensics, techniques for risk assessment and risk mitigation.

The course will prepare students for more in-depth courses such as SRA 211, SRA 221 and SRA 311

Just reading this makes me can't wait til we get back from our lame, so-called vacation that is only 3 weeks just to attend this class. I mean, I really have no idea what to expect because it is only an introductory to the course, but I doubt that even if this class turns out to be not what I dreamed of, it most definitely kill my spirits about this class. I have became very interested in this field through personal interest, and also my girlfriend is a forensics science major and when she talks to me about her criminology class, I just hear ever word she says (which is rare for guys to do). I also plan on taking a course dealing with world news, like world politics or something like that. I may just be changing majors from IST to SRA. And hopefully, I will be a student of Mr. Gerry Santoro and experience his unique teaching methods!

Originally to be titled Sony PS3 Island Vs. Microsoft Xbox Island, maybe because I didn't have a premium account, I had to change subjects since I was told I was not able to transport to one of those islands. Took me a while but I decided to use Dell and IBM.

I chose to visit Dell first and really liked it. The Island was really easy to explore, as in I was able to fly back to where I wanted to go most of the time. To help with that, Dell's space had many teleport stations leading to every island that Dell had. The way you would transport would be really cool! One would click on the poster, then it would tell you to sit on a pod that came out of nowhere behind you. You would sit and then you would teleport to the Island or place of choice.

A button an avatar would touch to teleport to other places.

Dell did a good job setting up ads for their gaming laptops (don't really recall any other product being advertised) because that was one of the things that kept popping into my head when I would think about Dell's space.

An XPS Laptop

Something I really liked was the fact that it was nicely built with the many interesting buildings and big domes with the logo Dell everywhere. Plus the fact that I was able to go to each island rather than not be able to go to some because I was not given permission to made me feel like Dell is showing you what they completely got, making everything accessible to the user.

Something I did not like about Dell's space would be the fact that it did not have as much information about Dell as I had hoped there would be. There were minor pieces of information, but nothing major like a new product coming out, or talks about Dell's next step into computers. All I know is that if somebody asked me if they should visit Dell's space on Second Life for more information about them, I would tell them they are better off reading the wikipedia page on Dell.

For my second Second Life space I'd checked out, I found a lot of things that I did not like about this place after wandering around aimlessly for an hour.
1, IBM's space was waaaaaaaay too big!
2. I was unable to get to certain islands because I did not have access to that island.
3. I kept getting lost everywhere all the time!
4. Boring!
5. WAAAY TOO BIG!

Maybe its because I'm hungry and the desire to finish this as soon as possible is getting to me, I really was not a fan of IBM's HUGE space on Second Life.
Starting off, I thought IBM's huge space on Second Life would be a positive experience, but after flying around trying to get to know the place, and because I failed at knowing the place, I really grew tired of having to press the map key button to transport to where I wanted to go by flying. It might have been the small attention I get when I am bored, but I kept getting lost after a while as I felt like I kept seeing the same buildings over and over again! It was at this point when I began terribly missing being in Dell's four-island space. Maybe the space isn't boring to investigate, but since I kept getting lost, I was tempted to click the red boxed X on the top-right of the screen and end my misery, and I did after an hour!
Though I really didn't like the place, there were some stuff that I thought were cool and interesting. In my aimless wandering, I came upon the Italy island from IBM. I was surprised to see this because that meant that IBM must have many business through Second Life. I mean I am pretty sure it wasn't their only non-english space, so IBM must have a pretty big radius of business in the world. Plus with all those islands, there must be a lot users may be able to learn about IBM, well hopefully!

Anyone at this point can tell that I did not enjoy IBM, I thought Dell's space was a much more of a delightful experience as to IBM exploration being tiresome and boring and being lost the whole time. But if I ever get some free time over 4 hours, and I am near a computer with Second Life, I would love nothing more than to sit down and waste those four hours exploring IBM's space. I think I would actually enjoy IBM's space more than Dell's space because IBM's many islands will hold a lot more information for me to read rather than Dell's four island space with barely an information.

nowhere near the entire map of IBM's space!!!

After using Second Life on my computer, I was able to share the thoughts of group member Martha who down to the deepest part of her soul hates Second Life. I don't really remember her exact reasons for hating the virtual world, but I do remember her saying something about it being soooo slow and constantly crashing, and oh boy, did that happen so many times. Here I am trying to get used to Second Life, when out of nowhere, I can't move. This happened soo many times that after like the 20th time I decided Second Life and I are pure enemies and so I exited for the 20th time and dread the 21st time I will have to do it. Another thing I don't like is that Second Life to me seems like a game. It is animated, you can make your own avatar, and you move around and stuff, and maybe that is why I hate it. This has got to be the most boring game I have ever had the chance to play, and because I am not having any fun, I quickly grew such an abhorrence to the virtual world. Though, I do still find it innovating in the world of technology, and personally I can't wait until it gets a WHOLE LOT BETTER because this virtual world not only not fun, every time I go on, and fly to places, there is no one on.

I was cleaning my room when I found my broken Zune when I totally became angry at the fact I didn't take care of it longer. I am one of those people that NEED to listen to music as they walk to class, but ever since my Zune broke, I have learned to manage. I then remembered that Microsoft had created a new Zune; a smaller and cheaper one! Because I fell in love with the Zune and its easy-to-get-used-to features, I decided to check it out and debate whether or not I should buy another. I go to the site and check out their products, and now I can't wait til I get enough money to buy one. Though it is pretty much the same features, I missed its huge screen, and watching good quality movies on it, and listening to my favorite songs through the high quality premium earphones that it comes with. Though it is 249.99 without taxes and accessories, it truly is my favorite electronic device from Microsoft. I can't wait til my hands are all over this new 80gb 3.2 inch color display, 30 hours of battery life beauty that can hold 20,000 songs or 250 hours of video that is the ZUNE!

Team Wintermute decided to build a sign physically modeled after the design and structure of the Penn State IST building. But how would we present the picture? There are many types of signs, and after seeing what some other people had done, we decided that a billboard was not included in the decisions of many other groups. Team Wintermute thinks that if you were to advertise in Second Life, it would have to be visible from the flight path and travel patterns of individuals.

Matt Maisel was the best builder of the team, and he spear-headed the creation of our billboard. Martha took pictures, and started building what would be put on the poster. Paul and Eric looked for pictures that described IST accurately.

Going back to our flickr collection from a previous assignment, we used pictures of the IST building to convey our feelings about IST. Matt encountered an interesting dilemma as he tried to picture what the essential components of a billboard actually were. After looking up pictures of a billboard, he began sculpting away at several rectangular prims, making bars, a ladder, and other various components. We are glad that it came out so realistic- Matt is pretty good with that stuff! Martha finished a very professional poster, thanks to the wonders of mac computers, which left one small task... The uploading of textures.

It is 10 Lindens to upload a texture into Second Life. Good thing 10 Lindens only equates to more or less 5 cents! We had to wait more than an hour to get the confirmation that the money had been uploaded correctly, but other than the small wait, everything in this assignment went as planned.

The only thing missing from this document is a picture of the finished product. here it is!!