Internet Censorship

My Scientific Yet Poetic Mind

My Hello World runs

It prints to the terminal

Crashes on SEG FAULT

My set is unique

Swiftly traversing the tree

Found a duplicate

Here Comes Everybody

The Internet has created a sophisticated social network that connects people from all across the globe. This connectivity gives an incredible amount of power any person that wants to gather large groups of people together. Such power can have a positive influence for good, such as the Egyptian riots that protested via Twitter. However, such power can be abused or used for wrongdoing. In a specific example, one man, Evan Guttman, was able to use the Internet in order rally thousands of supporters to recover a lost cell phone. Guttman’s story made national news over a $350 phone that was recovered by a 16 year girl that refused to return the property. Guttman’s reasons to recover the phone were not immoral, but Sasha Gomez did not deserve the punishment that she received during this time. She was labeled by the national news as a thief and was arrested in order to return the stolen property. Although Guttman’s actions were noble and Sasha’s actions were dishonest, she didn’t deserve to be made an example to the entire nation. Action needed to happen before Sasha Gomez was humiliated to the entire public. We need to establish a system that allows the right thing to be done without destroying the lives of the opposing party.

Women in Computer Science

As technology evolves, it fails to appeal to women as a satisfactory career option. Since the mid 1990s, fewer women have enrolled in computer science every year. Computer science needs more women engineers in order to add more diversity and creativity to the field. More women have joined math and science departments across the nation, but less women choose to pursue computer science. The first step in reversing this decline is to ask women who switch out of computer science to explain the key points that caused them to change careers. By answering that question, departments can advertise computer science to women better than they could without knowing what drives women away.

Open Source Production

Open source programming creates a different kind of product from those products released by most software companies. Open source projects bring the community together in order to produce an application that serves the public. This style of programming introduces a new kind of synergy in the programming world, but also presents several problems. Because anyone in the community can contribute code to the application, malicious code can be submitted in order to provide a backdoor to hackers if the code is subtle enough to pass code inspections. On the other hand, the community provides many solutions to the problems that the application tries to solve and costs nothing to the company. Open source projects have many benefits, but risk increasing the number of bugs in a program and potentially introducing backdoors for hackers to break into the program.

“Too much of a good thing is a bad thing”

There exists a limitless need for computers. These machines can be used for creation, design, entertainment, communication, and much more. As computers become more powerful, our desire to get more use out of our computers grows. Elder David A. Bednar counsels us that we should be responsible with technological advancements and usage. He reminds us that as we use these devices we need to be able to feel the Holy Spirit in our life and not impede our ability to live, to love, and to serve. There are many examples of computer use that clearly drive away the Spirit of the Lord or invite the Spirit into our lives. However, other uses are not as obvious, such as computer gaming. Video games provide entertainment and a sense of accomplishment to many gamers. But, at what point do video games change from being something we love to being an obstacle that prevents our ability to live and to serve?