I am extrememly excited that warm weather is here and classes will soon be wrapping up! However, I am not looking forward to packing the abundance of stuff that is cramed into my small dorm room. Tonight I along with other freshmen will be up until long after twelve trying desprately to register for classes for next semester. I have rearranged my schedule multiple times and just hope I can get all of the classes I need.
Off to knock off a few things on the never ending to do list....
Hope everyone is having a good week, I feel like we haven't seen our classmates in a while.. (not that I am complaining)
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Facebook Song
While I was doing research, and looking for an oppsoing article I came across this song. Its pretty funny, however much of what he says is true for so many of us. Are we all just wasting our time on Facebook? It is starting to seem like that to me...
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Is Facebook Your Choice Drug?
Just thought I would share some information I found while researching for my argumentative paper. I know a lot of us seem to be arguing points regarding addiction..
Heres the link to an article by Fox News about a college that set up and followed through with a complete social networking band! Harrisburg University in central PA held a week long band of Facebook, Twitter, IM and other forms of media. Results from the blackout show true signs of addiction to social media. Being that students couldnt long on throught their computers, many were caught sneaking away on their smart phone to check the latest newsfeed. One student also admitted to feeling like he needed to check his FB 21 hours a day! The other 3 hours were used strictly for sleeping when he would block updates. Can you say addicted?? What would students do if Queens imposed something like this for a week or even just a day? What other interesting information have people found on addiction?
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/09/24/social-media-ban-experiment-reveals-facebook-twitter-users-display-signs/
Heres the link to an article by Fox News about a college that set up and followed through with a complete social networking band! Harrisburg University in central PA held a week long band of Facebook, Twitter, IM and other forms of media. Results from the blackout show true signs of addiction to social media. Being that students couldnt long on throught their computers, many were caught sneaking away on their smart phone to check the latest newsfeed. One student also admitted to feeling like he needed to check his FB 21 hours a day! The other 3 hours were used strictly for sleeping when he would block updates. Can you say addicted?? What would students do if Queens imposed something like this for a week or even just a day? What other interesting information have people found on addiction?
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/09/24/social-media-ban-experiment-reveals-facebook-twitter-users-display-signs/
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
WOW! Would you have thought of this?
This eighty four year old man surrvived for 5 days on windsheild wiper fluid. Its crazy some of the things that we will do when we are stranded and left with little to no options for surrvival. I am amazed he only suffered minimal damange to his body. I certainly wouldnt have thought of windsheild wiper fluid as a source of hydration but I guess its better than motor oil.
Check it out, its a short but interesting video
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/84-year-old-survives-5-days-in-desert-on-wiper-fluid/6kku473?q=Survival&rel=msn&from=en-us_msnhp&form=msnrll>1=42010%0d
Check it out, its a short but interesting video
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/84-year-old-survives-5-days-in-desert-on-wiper-fluid/6kku473?q=Survival&rel=msn&from=en-us_msnhp&form=msnrll>1=42010%0d
Monday, February 7, 2011
Facebook Ads.
Well over the course of the night, I have been on and off Facebook multiple times. I have refreshed my page and still NOTHING! No ads, not even one. Does that mean that I am not interesting enough for the ad companies? Or maybe that I am just above them, on a higher level or something? Or that I am too unique to fit into any one of their endless categories; unless they invent with a Taylor Rebecca Helms category! Wait, I think they some how know that I have way to much homework to be distracted with ads, never mind that I am constantly on a social networking site just to see "what's happening". I guess I am a prime example of the exception.
I will update later if any ads appear over the next couple of days. Has this happened to anyone else?
Thanks Serena! I was playing Cafe World and finally noticed an ad on my page! The one I noticed was "Are you sexy or simple?" It was an ad to take a fashion quiz to find out what type of fashionista you are. I didnt take the quiz but feel I am a weird combination of many fashion types. I often like retro clothes but can also be a very simple jeans and t shirt kind of girl. I do have certain times when I just want to dress up!
I will update later if any ads appear over the next couple of days. Has this happened to anyone else?
Thanks Serena! I was playing Cafe World and finally noticed an ad on my page! The one I noticed was "Are you sexy or simple?" It was an ad to take a fashion quiz to find out what type of fashionista you are. I didnt take the quiz but feel I am a weird combination of many fashion types. I often like retro clothes but can also be a very simple jeans and t shirt kind of girl. I do have certain times when I just want to dress up!
Cafe World
As I am working on my rough draft, I never realized how far you could dig inside a simple game on Facebook. What started out as a fun way to waste time has turned into a very interesting evaluative paper topic. I have been given the opportunity to not only play a game as part of my homework, but to also discover the good and bad of Cafe World. Before this experience, I didn't quite realize how many real life principles could be taught by playing a game. (I don't want to reveal my whole paper BUT...) I understand that many people find these types of games overrated and annoying. My personal opinion is that they can also be a way to relax and fall back into the childhood memories of all the fun games we played. Do I think that there needs to be improvement of Facebook games and the notifications? Yes! Do I think that they are still worth a try? Yes! There are so many games on Facebook you are sure to find one that entices you in some way. I am not telling anyone to become the top chef or richest farmer; I am simply saying that Facebook games have proved interesting in more ways than one. Check them out!
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
New York Times writes about Facebook
Here's the link to an interesting article. The article provides astonishing facts like the book, but on a more recent platform. It tocuhes on changes to Facebook that have happened just months ago, as well ,the recent monetary value of Facebook. New York Times talks about the always concerning privacy policies for Facebook users. Read and learn more about the new "Goldman Deal".
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
How far would you go?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41277763/ns/world_news-asiapacific/?GT1=43001
This article popped up on my homepage and seemed interesting. My roommate and I read the article aloud and were astonished by the extremes that this went to in order to not be caught by police. I cannot image first, committing the crime that he did and second, doing these horrible things to himself. He later confessed to his crime so I can't seem to understand why he went to such great measures.
Regardless, this is a very interesting article.
Let me know your reactions!
This article popped up on my homepage and seemed interesting. My roommate and I read the article aloud and were astonished by the extremes that this went to in order to not be caught by police. I cannot image first, committing the crime that he did and second, doing these horrible things to himself. He later confessed to his crime so I can't seem to understand why he went to such great measures.
Regardless, this is a very interesting article.
Let me know your reactions!
Monday, January 24, 2011
My Wordle!
<a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor"
title="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"><img
src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor"
alt="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor
Not sure which one of these links works.... Still unsure how to put the actual picture on here
title="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"><img
src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor"
alt="Wordle: The Life of Taylor"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3033354/The_Life_of_Taylor
Not sure which one of these links works.... Still unsure how to put the actual picture on here
The Social Network Movie Review
Movie Review
The Social Network (2010)
NYT Critics' PickThis movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The New York Times.
Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures
Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.”
Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: September 23, 2010
What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook — 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting — Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He’s also the smartest guy in the room, and don’t you forget it.
Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures
Defriended: From left, Andrew Garfield, Joseph Mazzello, Jesse Eisenberg and Patrick Mapel in “The Social Network.”
The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he’s 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard’s women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.
(“The Social Network” opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)
Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.
The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.
Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.
The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.
The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”
(“The Social Network” opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)
Although the names have remained the same, “The Social Network” is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don’t learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook’s less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It’s a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life — and ours — into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.
The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven’t gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin’s script, which follows the outline of “The Accidental Billionaires,” Ben Mezrich’s book about Facebook, was one of the site’s co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark’s as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.
Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark’s face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it’s a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he’s been cut loose.
The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark’s interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark’s programming help. They’ll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark’s reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark’s breakup with Erica. “You’d do that for me?” he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.
The conspicuous paradox that “The Social Network” plays with is that the world’s most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates “a community,” a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto “You Are Not a Gadget,” Facebook also reduces life to a database. In “The Social Network,” a character lashes out at both Mark and “the angry” who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it’s fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the “new strain of gadget fetishism.”
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Visual Persuasive Rhetoric
http://www.oregonhypnosis.com/smoking.htm
The persuasive message is that if you are given cigarettes as a child they can easily become addictive and affect the rest of your life. Once you start smoking, it is unlikely that you will be able to quit reguardless of what it does to you and your body. The intended audience is the people who are giving cigarettes to children day after day. It is tryin to get the attention of people who dont realize how addicting smoking can be. This is ad is aimed to grab the attention of every enabler, every smoker, and every person who has ever thought of smoking.The California Department of Health Services is the author of this ad. Seeing the cigarette in her hand and the smoke blowing out of the hole in her throat is a scary but very surreal image. The look in her eyes screams for help; we can tell from the photo that she wants to desprately quit.
Friday, January 14, 2011
First Blog
Here it is, and I am already confused. lol
Time to get some work done before it actually feels like the weekend.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)