Final Writing Assignment

At first, I was a bit overwhelmed working with Project Open Hand. When I initially saw their database, my thoughts were, "Oh man this is going to get sloppy." And then they also told me that they wanted me to create and distribute a survey for them. 

After sinking all of this in and actually doing the tasks, the work wasn't as bad as I thought. Though the work and research did require a lot of time outside of the Friday hours, Tae Hee and I plowed through it and helped the special events staff with a lot of things that they've been complaining about.

This experience has given me a taste of what consulting is like. We examined the problem, brainstormed possible solutions, and weighed the pros and cons of each solution. I am little more confident on going out to the real world and using my skills to help others.

My Community Partner

This semester I am working with Project Open Hand. They are located on the corner of Polk and Eddy. Since 1985, Project Open Hand has been providing “meals with love” to people living with serious illnesses and to seniors in San Francisco and Alameda County and has served as a model for over 100 organizations all over the world.

I am specifically helping them create and distribute a survey to their volunteers to update their volunteer database with thousands of entries. In addition to that, I am helping them restructure and organize their database in hopes to help make it more user friendly. Currently they have to do a lot of tedious work to do certain things within their database. At the end of this term, I hope to automate most of the tedious work and make the database easier to use.

Digital Information

Rhapsody

Rhapsody is a website that provides streaming audio on all sorts of genres of music. They make their money on monthly subscriptions on their service as well as advertisements on their website. Users basically pay a monthly fee for infinite usage and discounted downloading.

Consumers can only play the music using Rhapsody's software. That limits the amount of freedom that consumers have with the media content. Users can, however, burn CDs using Rhapsody's software.

iTunes

iTunes is a media player that also has downloading capabilities for music from Apple's content server. The catch is that users will have to pay a standard fee for each song. This can accumulate in cost quickly depending on amount of desired songs.

Consumers have a little more freedom with the media they download from iTunes. They can copy it over to their ipods and burn CDs. iTunes makes an attempt at restricting users to put their downloaded content into other mp3 players by making their content in another format. However, there are hacks to convert the files into mp3.

Hulu

Hulu is a streaming video website for modern TV shows, movies, and sports clips. I'm not sure if they really make any money, but they can provide their content as long as they show ads from the owner of the content.

Consumers don't have much freedom other than the ability to view Hulu's content only on Hulu. Hulu makes sure to only let users view content using Hulu's software. Users cannot download content from the website.

What is LAMP?

LAMP is an acronym for:

Linux
Apache
MySQL
PHP/Perl/Python

These are vital components to web based software - operating system, web server, database, and programming language. LAMP is popular because each component is open source, making it easy to acquire and get set up quickly as opposed to buying commercial software.

3.4 Situation Analysis

The cop probably told the students to paint over the mural because of the message that it might deliver. Since it was a public setting and the mural had religious figures, not everyone may feel the same way about those particular figures. Some may even get offended if they have a difference of opinion. The cop just thought that that type of painting should be in a more controlled setting rather than out in the public. He probably thought that a painting of religious figures could potentially lead to little wars between those who agree and those who disagree with the message of the painting.

As far as the students' reaction probably should be offended, yet understanding that a painting of that measure should probably be in an area where majority of the people would appreciate it. Although they may have thought that it was appropriate, the cop was only trying to prevent hate crimes.

There seems to be a huge difference between the blame on a single individual rather than on a group of individuals. With one person, the means can be put on that person alone, whereas with a group of people, there may be a spectrum of contribution towards the painting for example. "We" also seems to have a more powerful connotation in contrast to "I." Obviously two heads are better than one, and more can be accomplished with help.

Digital Privacy

Digital privacy seems to be more of a negative right. Users that are privacy advocates would probably want their digital information protected from unwanted viewers. For example, a current example would be facebook. People upload photos and put content up that they'd probably prefer that only certain people can view (i.e friends). If we had some negative rights, then our information would be protected from unwanted viewers. Maybe users wouldn't want their parents or employers to see their personal life.

On the other hand, digital privacy can also be looked at as a positive right in some aspects. Users can have the right to post up their information and have the right to control who can view it. In the facebook example, users should have the right to have their information displayed to their friends and only their friends.

Digital privacy seems to be the gray area in between a positive and negative right. Though it can be argued both ways, it is still a right and it should not be taken away.

Engaged Citizenship

I think it is totally appropriate for colleges to teach their students about engaged citizenship. However, the approach on their method of teaching that should be reviewed carefully. Teaching anything political should be taught in an agnostic manner where each side of a view is exposed. In this way, students can form an opinion on their own as opposed to the class shaping their view.

Colleges also have a right to choose the appropriate subjects in which they think a student should be equipped with when they graduate. For example, USF has their core curriculum which includes some classes that other schools may not have. In USF's case they require a theology course since they are a Jesuit university.

Although academics is the primary reason for going to college, street smarts should be taught as well in an unbiased way.