My first reaction as I was watching this video was “I HEARD THAT IN THE CARTOONS I WATCHED GROWING UP.”  I never really had no idea where it had come from so hearing a piece of the original song from 1969 was quite enticing.  Never had I ever heard of these men below.

It comes as no surprise that many musical artists and entertainment/advertisement industries take advantage of this six-second drum sample because it is so catchy; however, there are many issues and questions that come with the use of this drum sample.

One important issue is the use of the piece legally.  Did every single artist and advertising company ask to The Winstons if they were able to use this drum sample in their work?  The answer to that is no.  This is clearly a form of plagiarism in my opinion.  Here is the definition of plagiarism as defined by Dictionary.com.  After reading that it can easily be said that the use of this piece is quite a violation of plagiarism.  The Winstons have the potential to make quite a large sum of money if they ever pursued legal action to receive payment for the use of their drum sample.  Or the people that use this beat should at least give credit to them for coming up with such a catchy beat.

The video addresses the idea that people have changed up the order of the beats in order to create an original copy.  In my opinion, the changing of the order of beats is not an original.  It is just using the same beats and moving them around; in essence, still a violation of rights.  I believe that The Winstons deserve a lot more credit than they’ve ever received for the use of this sample.  The fact that companies are profiting off this sample is ridiculous.  The Amen Break is quite the controversial issue.

In the end, I really enjoyed this video.  It really opened up my eyes to copyright and the way people get around that.  It was quite informative; however, the voice of the narrator was quite an annoying monotone.  Overall, good video.

Morris Article

Internal

1. Light
2. Out of place
3. Logic
4. Missing? Bodies
5. Randomness

External

1. How cannonballs were used
2. Motivation: Artistic, Practical, Political (Audience)
3. Who’s behind the camera

Morris Process

1. Internal investigation

• a) Count
• b) Shadows/Light
• c) Rocks – movement

1. Site

• a) Maps
• b) Diary
• c) Can see that not much has changed

1. Conclusion

• a) Always look at small things

Photography as a Weapon

Techniques

1. Attribution
2. Motivation
3. Review
4. Evidence
5. Check digitization (i.e. jpeg)

Wikipedia

• Admin
• Editors
• Writers
• “Watchers”

For me Wikipedia has always been a place of quick reference for things I haven’t quite heard about; however, I’ve never actually evaluated the content on the page.  For this reason I am going to evaluate the English page on the Cuban missile crisis.  This is a topic I have much knowledge about after doing a paper on it my freshman year.  I will evaluate this page based on sources, discussion and history.

By just reading the article, I can tell that the author(s) worked to make the Wikipedia page have as little bias as possible.  For every statement there is regarding the hard work of the Americans, there’s also a statement regarding the work of the Cubans/Russians.  Another thing I noticed in the discussion is that the page has a lot more background on the reactions and actions of the Americans rather than that of the Russians.  After seeing that content I looked towards the sources and noticed that there was not one attributed Russian reference which could be beneficial to the content of the page.  As seen in the photo below most, if not all, of the references are from authors and departments of the United States.  This really has a great effect on the validity of the article.

When looking over the history of the article I also noticed that much of the history is only attributed to the American viewpoint.  This is a result of the sources.  I feel if the article showed an equivalent amount of both sides it would be much more useful to people looking to get a grasp on the topic.  I would not go as far as saying that the Wikipedia page will be a good reference for information just due to the fact that almost anyone can go in and give there 2 cents to the page.  Some might also the page is already long enough and it is not needed; however, without an open viewpoint the page doesn’t serve as a good source of information.

The manipulation of photography is a problem that has been on the rise recently for the past few years.  Technologies have permitted us to alter and change the features of a photo.  By doing these things, this can completely change the meaning of the photo resulting in a false understanding of the viewer.  Magazines have been doing this for years.  They often chop a photo to make it seem as if something else is going on.  Photo manipulation, in my view, is a huge problem that our society now faces.  I realize it may have its benefits, but I believe the cons outweigh the pros.  For example, the photo below is definitely a photo that could prove demeaning towards a certain group; this is only done through the use of photo manipulation.

Photos can really create deceptive meanings and even more so with the availability of photo manipulation and editing services that can be found all around the web.  I really enjoyed the article by Morris on the idea of Photography as a Weapon.  It really goes to show how the meanings can be changed in a photo just by adding a few words or editing out something that is already present.  A great example from his articles is found below of the missile launch in which was fabricated in order to make it look a lot worse than it actually was.

All of the red boxes represent pieces that were fabricated or copied patterns (Johnson)

One definite con of the digitization and manipulation of photos is the fact that they can be misleading and provide the observer with wrong information.  Until there is a very efficient way to prove the fabrication of a photo, I think there should be rules regarding the publishing and advertising of a false photo such as the one above, which caused much controversy in the United States.  A great example of photo misconceptions is the advertisement of “Before-and-After Photos”.  It is said that 85-90% of the photos are manipulated in some way to enhance or demean the person in the photo.  In conclusion, I am not a supporter of the digitization of photography, it really doesn’t have the same effect of a well-taken photo and can easily be manipulated or edited.

Scavenger Hunt Discussion

– Teacher strike: will find any article with the words teacher and strike

– “Teacher strike”: will only find articles that have the specific quoted phrase

– By using more search options, it is easier to narrow down the search depending on what type of piece is being searched for

– Command-Shift-4 for screen shot on Mac; Print Screen on Windows

– Plural will result in different results than the singular

– Consistency is a good criteria to base accurateness off of

– Site:.edu will search just for sites under the .edu domain (can be used for other domains)

Audio

– Only certain amount of gradients a digital audio copy can have

– Can get faithful reproductions, but never exact

– Every point has to be a 0 or a 1, cannot be a 0.5.

– MP3 encoding standard is meant to compress file (~ 5MB)… MP3 converts 0.8’s to 1’s, etc.

Video

– When digitized, everything is converted to 1’s and 0’s… like audio

– Chopped up into pixels; use of differential

– Evolution of video has caused quality issues nowadays with the use of High-Definition

– Faithful reproduction of video is difficult to come about; Titanic produced earlier is not the same as the new 3D/HD Titanic nowadays

Text

Images

As for everything I look up, I began my search on Google… Its always been reliable to me so why not now?  Quickly I found that Google provided me with results I wasn’t looking for.

After that I moved on to Google Scholar, in which I found the first target of the scavenger the hunt “An op-ed on a labor dispute involving public school teachers from before 1970” by using this search with some things we learned in class “!op-ed” “labor dispute” “public” “1970”.  Here is a link to the University of California EScholarship article.  The article gives brief examples of public labor disputes that occurred prior to 1970 in the introductory section.

The 2nd one was a bit more difficult to find.  After doing a bit of research through Wikipedia, I found out that solar panels were also called photovoltaic systems.  This made my search a bit easier.  From a few searches involving “!photovoltaic” and “first use” I found out that Bell Laboratories could have been the first documented use of the cell.  I then verified this by finding a reliable source here in the Wiley Online Library through Google Scholar using “!Photovoltaic” “first use” “Bell”.  The first documented use of solar power in the United States was in 1954 by Bell Laboratories.

As for the third, I found this the most difficult because I have no knowledge of California Ballot Initiatives… I had no idea what to search… I began a simple Google search which then led me to the California Government site.  Through the site I found a PDF file regarding all ballot history from 1912-2002… Although it is missing 10 years I found this to be the best resource to find California Ballot Initiatives; init_history-1.

For me the scavenger hunt was quite a test for me, but with the use of symbols to make the search more precise I was able to find all of the required targets through the use of Google Scholar.

How does Google get its results so quickly?

• “Spider” crawls through the web
• Pre-conceived Index: compiles massive index of all the words it has seen/found (includes numbers)
• Pre-ranked Pages: a “voting” system decided by “Higher-ranked” webpages accessing pages.
• Title of webpage, boldness, etc are indicators of importance for webpages.

Past search engines would show top results as any page that had listed the topic the most.

Ranking is always a problem when it comes to search engines; “What does it cover, what does it not?”

All search engines use a different ranking algorithm for deciding which pages appear first.

“Web doesn’t work like a set of historical documents.”

“Pages are interrelated through the link.”

“Web is an interrelated set of votes.”

Google has scanned 20,000,000 books… only 200,000,000 books are believed to be in existence from any language (10% of all books online)

Search engines ignore Stop words like ‘The’, ‘A’, ‘An’, ‘Of’, ‘In’, ‘On’

How do you be more specific when searching?

• Quotations look for a specific phrase in a document
• Exclusion of words with use of –
• ~ can sometime mean synonyms
• + is a forced inclusion
• Metadata (data about data including Publisher’s name, Year of Publish)
• * is a wildcard (matches any word)
• AND, OR help with results

“Literacy of the modern world…”

Prior to using Proquest, the only experience I had using databases were for my research paper such as the database JSTOR or Google Books.  Proquest has definitely surpassed my expectations of an online database.  It is easy and simple to use, especially with its advanced search.  Many databases have a complex search engine which is difficult to use for those who do not have experience or digital knowledge.  Proquest advanced search easily lays everything out as seen here in their advanced search engine.  This allows for easy access to articles as well as specific searching of topics in order to narrow down research as well as saving time.

For example, I used the Proquest search engine to search for articles on the Cuban Missile Crisis and I was surprised about how accurate the search was when using the advanced search engine; however, when using the normal quick search I did not get the exact articles I was looking for.  Personally, I think research databases should always have a specific default search engine.  The general search just doesn’t get the job done for me.  I’m sure some databases may be smaller and more specific, but the advanced search performs many times better.

I feel that there will always be a need for a physical storage of books.  This is only due to the fact that some people are technologically challenged and will not be capable of using an online database for research.  For that reason, I believe there will always be libraries and storages around holding physical copies of books.

Other than being technologically challenged, there are many people who prefer to read or study a physical copy rather than gaze at a digital screen while working on a project or paper; however, once that generation of physical readers has been outgrown there may be the possibility of the literary world going completely digital.  I don’t think this is to happen within 10 or even 20 years…. but give it 50 to 100 years and I’ll bet that paper books will be thing of the past.

Positives & Negatives of Digitization

Positives:

• Accessibility
• Communication
• LOCKSS – system of keeping multiple copies of a digital copy
• Democratization (can also be negative)
• Manipulability – virtual repair
• Time

Negatives:

• Scale – flood of information, expectations
• Authenticity?
• Loss
• Trust
• “Bubble”
• Selection (bias)
• Distance – experience physical vs digital
• Responsibility – online interactions vs face-to-face interactions

People want to see the physical copy of things rather than the digital copy.

Music and books are making less and less money due to digital copies.

The days of selling records and physical books is slowly coming to a halt.

Markup Languages

• SGML
• HTML
• XML
• KML (Google)

“Any markup language merely wraps words with codes.”

“..simple way to describe what’s going on in text in an embedded fashion.”

“HTML document is a text document that has tags to describe what’s going on.”

Before: < >   After: </ >

Example: <title>Shakespeare’s <i>Comedy of Errors</i></title>

A File Structure for The Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate by T.H. Nelson was quite an interesting piece.  On the first page Nelson mentions Bush’s Memex in relevance to the goal they were trying to reach at the current time.  I found it interesting that Nelson says the uses of the file are so complex yet the structure is to be “simple and building-block” which I found interesting that in order to perform such complex functions the file should be as basic as possible.  Nelson has proven himself as an efficient critical thinker in this piece.

From the reading, it can be said that Nelson’s piece is an evaluation and check-up on the predictions of Vannevar Bush which is very intriguing due to the fact that this only two decades later; yet, in present time we have access to this technology.

“To go back only as far as 1945, Vannevar Bush, in his famous article
“As We May Think “l , described a system of this type. Bush’s paper is better remembered
for its predictions in the field of information retrieval, as he foresaw
the spread and power of automatic document handling and the many new indexing
techniques it would necessitate.” (Nelson)

Nelson lists 3 key ideas that need to be investigated in order for this technology to work:

1. The information structure; Zippered Lists
2. The file structure; Evolutionary List File (ELF)
3. The file language; PRIDE

Nelson then goes to mention that the hardware is capable of handling this technology, but the file is not able to handle such an intricate job as to storing mass amounts of data.  He discusses reasons why people have not been able to make the file work by introducing three false theories.

These theories are:

• “writing is a matter of inspiration”
• ‘”writing consists of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”‘
• “all you really need is a good outline”

Nelson’s idea of ELF really caught my eye because everything about it is what we use in today’s world.  These include:

• Entries
• Lists
• Links
• Sequences

All of these operations are used in today’s world which makes me wonder what else was created/predicted back then and made its way into today’s world.  It is just amazing what people have done in order to contribute to such elaborate technology like this.  ELF essentially set up what we have today.

The complexity of ELF