December 2008 Archives

Merry Christmas!  Enjoy my favorite Christmas song below!

 

Congratulations to the 2008 Penn State Women's Volleyball Team on defending their national championship!  With 6 All-Americans and only losing 2 sets all year, the team has truly had a dream season.  It was awesome seeing it on ESPN2, and I can't wait for the men's season to start up so that they too can defend their national championship!

I am officially in winter break mode and have time to do things that I have wanted to do all semester long.  One of the things that I have wanted to accomplish for a long time is to revamp the website for Science Lions.  Science Lions is a student organization that goes out to schools and community events to spread their passion for science.  I am the webmaster for this organization.  Recreating the website was a challenge, but I think the result looks good and is a step up from the previous version of the website.  It's a good start, and you can check it out for yourself by clicking here.

What is the value of a virtual gift?  Facebook, MySpace, and other Internet services sell virtual gifts that users can sent to other users as a way of wishing them a happy birthday or a variety of other reasons.  However, are virtual gifts really worth the money?  After all, people are just paying for pixels to send to their friends, which is virtually free to services such as Facebook.  In fact, 60 million of these virtual gifts have been purchased on Facebook generating third party sales of $35 to $50 million.  A spokesman for virtual gifts has said the following about the value of these gifts:

"The pixels themselves don't cost anything, but I think the reason they've been effective is that it ties into a deep psychological value.  The fact that there's a price associated with these new gifts that we're launching sort of just amplifies that message."

As far as I am concerned, paying for a virtual gift is a little ridiculous but a brillant move for those who are selling them as the profits are high and the costs of production are microscopic.  If I want to communicate a message of deep psychological value to another person, I'll talk to them face to face and not facebook to facebook.  However, considering the popularity of these virtual gifts and the spirit of the holiday season, here is a virtual gift of my own from me to you:

 

The big Batman news today was the DVD release of The Dark Knight, but there was another Batman news byte that was of interest.  In an effort to make comics come alive, Warner Brothers is releasing motion comics based on the comics of the DC Universe.  The first of these motion comics was released today in an episode of Batman: Black and White that can be purchased on iTunes.  A little taste was released:



Personally, based solely off the clip above, I really do not see the point or the advantages of the motion comic genre.  To me, the clip above looked like what the History Channel classically does in their programming by dramatically focusing on one section of a picture.  The movement also looked pretty cheesy as well.  I understand that DC Comics wants to widen the appeal of its comics and use new media as vehicles, but honestly, I believe an actual cartoon or animated series would work much better than the motion comics.  Batman: Black and White is a series of graphic novels that contains several short 8 page stories about the Caped Crusader and is something that I have wanted to sit down and read for a very long time.  Comics provide me with an escape where I can actively experience another world through panels and pages.  If I want to watch a Batman adventure, I will just watch The Dark Knight or Batman: The Animated Series.

The Dark Knight DVD is coming out this Tuesday, and I am very excited to see the movie for the sixth time!  Commercials and advertisements have been all over the place for The Dark Knight just adding to the excitement.....

This semester, Tim Nary and I have been working on a project for our honors option of IST 220.  Because IST doesn't have many honors courses and I need to take honors courses, an alternative is to "honors option" a class meaning diving in deeper to the subject matter through research assignments or projects.  The focus of IST 220 is networking and telecommunications.  For my honors option, Tim Nary and I built a social networking application called sophISTication, which serves as a group collaboration tool for IST students.  The catch with sophISTication was that our social networking application had to be viewable from a personal computer and from a mobile device.  We were able to detect how the user was viewing our social network through some PHP scripts.  Overall, sophISTication was a great supplement to the course. 

The countdown to Christmas has begun, and I have begun to do some damage to my personal advent calendar in my room.  However, if you don't have an advent calendar at home or would like to much on some visual eye candy as you count down to Christmas, I would suggest checking out two online advent calendars. 

The first advent calendar is the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar where every day a new photo will be released from the Hubble Space Telescope.  The pictures that have been released so far have been pretty breathtaking.  It is amazing that we have the ability to look out to the cosmos and have some understanding of what is going on billions of light years away. 

The second advent calendar is the Stephen Colbert Advent Calendar found at the home of the Colbert Nation.  Recently, Stephen Colbert had a Christmas special and in tandem with his special is releasing short clips of him each day as the holidays draw near.  Check this one out from December 4.

The Federal Communications Commissions has been fairly active lately in the potential future of Internet access in the United States.  In November of this year, the FCC voted to open up and unlicense the white space spectrum created by the consolidation of the television frequency spectrum due to Digital TV.  These frequencies have companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Motorola, and Google who are a part of the Wireless Innovation Alliance excited about the new avenues for broadband access in the United States, especially through a wireless technology known as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access.  Through using WiMAX, ISPs can blanket cities and communities with affordable high speed Internet access.

However, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a plan is in the works to create a free as well as pornography-free wireless service to all Americans through utilizing some of the frequenices in the white space spectrum.  The deal would be that an ISP could purchase a large amount of the white space spectrum frequencies but would have to dedicate a portion of these frequencies to providing free wireless Internet service to all Americans.

Personally, free wireless service to all Americans would be an enormous accomplishment and would have an equally enormous set of beneficial ramifications.  Setting up a nationwide wireless Internet network will take a lot of time, money, and resources.   However, with the current state of the economy and Barack Obama's plan to rebuild the infrastructure of this nation akin to FDR's Public Works Administration and other New Deal tactics, building a nationwide free wireless Internet network may feasible.  New jobs will be created building and maintaining the network.  Once the network is built and operational, the economic impacts of such a network would be astronomical.  With high speed Internet access, the opportunities for education and e-business are endless and would put the United States in a powerful place in this increasingly global and digital economy.