'expensive old analog' = 'cheap new digital'

Our July 14th class examined what analog is; as opposed to digital. Simply the title of this class made me think about how this topic relates to the music that I've been making. When I went over to my friend/producer's recording studio later after class (in his basement,) I was definitely able to apply what we had just learned. I glanced over at one of my producer's three monitors. There was a copy of 'Logic,' a very popular program that artists use to compile and edit music. There were the tracks (this particular song had over 50 of them). Obviously, the whole 'world' that this recording studio was revolved around the laws and entities of the 'digital universe'.
What really got me thinking were the dozens of plug-ins that my producer was messing with. I had seem many of them before, but I had never thought twice about them. They had very colorful interfaces...that was about it. After 15 minutes of discussion about them with my producer, I guess you could call me informed. These plugins (each of which costs from $500.00-$5000.00) were actually just a digital inscription; but of what? Virtually all of these plugins (with the cool colorful interfaces) were a transformation if you will; a conversion from the old to the new. Instead of rebuilding each of the original, analog machines (the oldest from 1960, the newest- 2002) to create and maintain the best possible sounds in my producer's basement, which would cost millions upon millions of dollars, he just buys a copy of the software. The software loads up and appears in the computer's GUI as an additional window that is linked to the 'Logic' 'mother-software'.
A few hundred megabytes, which are incredibly microscopic (relative to our digital world in 2011,) suddenly become a sound replacement ( pun-intended :D ) for massive, extremely expensive machines.

Big Ben

The best way to understand the digital, is in terms of its analogical. But what does digital mean? The idea of numbers is the most basic form of digital but digital doesn’t have to be binary, digital breaks things down into discrete units, (language, writing, the mechanical clock, printing). It is arbitrary which means one-to-one correspondence. On the other end of the spectrum the analogical uses continuous media. One example is art, which cannot isolate its units. Another example is the analogical clock. One of the most famous analogical clocks is located in London England and known as Big Ben. Big Ben is the largest 4-faced analogical clock in the world. The clock tower has become one of the most prominent symbols of both London and England, particularly in the visual media. Not only has Big Ben been the source of time for London but has also served as one of England’s cultural landmarks. I believe analogical clocks overtime have served as more than just a time source for many of our cultures, Big Ben being one of those traditions. Cathedrals all over the world still use analogical clocks to send off alarms throughout the day informing people to come to services. This is also a tradition that has become a part of our history and still continues to this day. Although they may be other ways to inform the people of the services with the technological advances we have made, it is the tradition and the representation of this clock that encourages people to keep analogical clocks around. It is the same reason why we still make watches that display the analogical clock as opposed to the digital face. We continue this tradition because it is the particular style that reminds us what the analogical clock represents. It becomes more than just a source of time; the analogical clock represents a thought process of all other possibilities, not just the single minded representation that we get from the digital clock.

http://www.aviewoncities.com/london/bigben.htm

I really enjoyed listening to the TED talk on technology. He had mentioned toward the end of his presentation that people are truly aware that they are living life against the law in terms of piracy, and illegal activity on the internet. It definitely struck a chord how prevalent this was, and how like never before people are ok with and continuing to make offenses against the law, probably because they do not see any alternatives, and for the most part able to get away with it. It also makes one think that people are conditioning themselves to taking laws more lightly than ever before. This has implications for law-breaking on a much greater scale, and is demonstrative of people's growing lack of respect for the law in more ways than petty offenses.

Digital v Analog

Analog: A tree has a rope tied to it on one end swinging back and forth by a person on the other end is an example of an 'analog' system. The rope, when shaken, creates waves that travel down the length of the rope until it hits the tree. Depending on how hard you shake the waves, the stronger or weaker the frequency is. Shake them side to side you see horizontal waves and vice if shaken up and down. In all cases, no matter which way the rope is moving waves are created.
Analog systems have a value that changes steadily over time with an infinite set of values in a range. Using the rope and tree example we see a continuous value in the range. If you placed a measuring stick at a point along the rope and then measure the strings height from the floor every second at that point. when you watch the string move, you will see it moves constantly. There is no discreteness detected as seen in digital media.

Digital: Digital media would be more like turning on and off a computer switch. There is no in between values that are seen analogically. The computer switch example uses the computer screen as our transmitter, the transmission media( a physical system used to carry a communication signal from one system to another) is the space between the screen and my eyes, and the receiver of the signal is my eye. Lastly, digital mediums use binary code, which uses the numbers 1 and 0.


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Computers: Becoming Outdated?

Last class we talked about the 3 E's [experience, environment, and event] that factor into a computer's popularity. We also said that we are quickly moving to an age where computers will be obsolete, replaced by phones, pads, tablets, etc. It reminded me of an article I saw in the Huffington Post last year: Can an iPad replace a Laptop? Everything you get from a computer can be found on an iPad. They even support Kindle and similar book apps - technology gurus have been saying for a long time that online books will surpass print books. It shocked me a little, especially since I still like handwriting my notes, having a tangible magazine in my hand, and have learned to love my laptop. Soon, I feel like I'm going to be that grandmother saying "Back in my day..." so I'll stop, but it did get me thinking about all the other things I grew up with that are starting to be considered outdated and less popular: landlines, dial-up internet, newspapers, video renting stores, and libraries. I found an article: Five Monopolies, Methods of Communication Losing Their Hold that goes into a little more detail. Just some food for thought.

The Apple 2 Microcomputer and it's Impact

The Apple 2 series was one of the first highly successful mass produced microcomputers introduced in 1977. The Apple 2 became one of the most recognizable and successful computers during the 1980’s. The company made the Apple 2 easily affordable through discounts and manufacturing agreements, especially for educational institutions. This made it the first computer to be used widespread in American schools. In doing this, Apple made the computer popular with business users and families. The Apple 2 series had an enormous impact on the technology industry and on everyday life. The Apple 2 was the first personal computer that many people ever saw during this time period. It’s price made it possible for many middle-class families to purchase, just like Apple did with the school systems. This gave Apple its popularity and marketing structure, which is part of the reason why they are still successful with their sales even to this day.

butterflyyy.

The butterfly effect is theory that claims a small change in one object or place could lead to a larger change in another object. For instance, a small change such as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could lead to larger consequences such as a hurricane or tornado in another part of the world. Though the theory was originally discovered by a meteorologist, it has been used in science fiction scenarios such as time travelling. Interestingly, this theory was incorporated into the 2004 movie “The Butterfly Effect” starring Ashton Kutcher. I think this theory is fascinating because it raises many questions about how the world functions. It also shows how the smallest change in an object could cause unexpected chaos. The movie wasn't too bad either. 

illoominati.

The Jacquard Loom is a remarkable machine considering it was invented in 1801. It is crazy how Joseph Marie Jacquard Loom invented a machine that used mainly holey cards and stings to create elaborate textile patterns. These fabric pieces were later used to clothe the people of France. Whether it was used to make a dress, pants, or in some cases even knickers. It is also amazing how a machine that makes simple fabrics was a model to the building and making of the complex computer.

A cyborg is any organism that has been enhanced due to technological advances. I believe that we are rapidly approaching a world where machines rule it. Eventually I feel they will construct a machine that learns the same way a human does, where a machine has the capacity to learn and the ability to change based on experience and retain that information. I did some research and stumbled upon an article which talked about the military trying to develop insect cyborgs in 2006. The whole idea was that the insects will be able to go places that the troops cannot, giving the military added surveillance. The video below demonstrates how the cyborg technolgy can be used to control the insects:


http://youtu.be/dSCLBG9KeX4

The "Anonymous" Hackers

One section of class yesterday that really grabbed my attention was the part about hackers. I did a little research about hacking and found out some information about a particularly large group of hackers who call themselves "anonymous." This group known as "anonymous" was started about eight years ago on the website/imageboard known as 4chan.org and has wreaked havoc on many websites since their beginning. This group has "declared war" on many institutions and companies such as the Spanish government, the Turkish Telecommunications Authority, Mastercard, and Paypal. These attacks were sparked by a variety of reasons, such as the police of certain countries hunting down members of anonymous and arresting them, which is the case for both the Spain and Turkey incidents. In these attacks they temporarily knocked out the website for Spain's national government and took over the website of the Turkish Telecommunications Authority and shut it down for nearly a day. The reason this group attacked the websites of Mastercard and Paypal was that they cut off their former funding to Wikileaks, which "is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks). In one of the articles i read about the group it says that they also led an attack on Sony and that they were planning to go after the Federal Reserve.

According to one of the members of Anonymous, "In general, the members rally around the belief that "people who hoard information are the same people who hoard wealth." It's amazing to see the ways that certain people can use the Internet to wage "wars" standing up for certain beliefs. If you would like to read more about anonymous here is an article that has a bunch of information about them:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/15/anonymous-hackers-to-ben-_n_877337.html

Artificial Intelligence: 'Skynet' takeover?

We discussed and learned about the post 1980s term "artificial intelligence," or 'A.I.'. Its pretty wild to envision a future (or present-for that matter) that is comparable to the worlds of Hollywood films like the Terminator, The Matrix, or The 13th floor; just to name a few. Could we one day create these A.I. / expert systems that somehow bring along a doomsday of sorts? I believe its highly unlikely. Yes, we may have created software that can beat (actually crush) the smartest human beings in Jeopardy. We may have created robots that have some form of A.I. inside of their programming...and as time advances, you can bet that these technologies will advance as well. The reason why I believe the 'A.I. Doomsday' (if you will) is highly unlikely, is for all of two main reasons. Firstly, these hypothetical A.I. systems would need a motive. Unless programmed to be totally self-sufficient and re-produce 100% (and I mean 100%) on its/their own, it just isn't probable. The second reason plays into a hypothetical dialectic of the first reason. Let's say, hypothetically, that someone designed A.I. software and hardware, and programmed said A.I. entity to be self-sufficient and re-produce (and maybe even kill humans or animals / destroy infrastructure); we can still always shut 'them' down:
TWO WORDS:
Electromagnetic pulse.

RXN vs. Simulation

Sure, a computer will one day will be able to to anticipate our needs, and essentially be able to respond to us, just as a human would. I firmly believe this to be true, as we had discussed in class. But I also feel like no matter how advanced our computers become, and amazingly there capabilities serve our needs, they are only as smart as the people implementing the data and creating the software programs, and can be seen as merely a simulation of real life and human interaction. They may be mistaken, at times, for human reactions, but they do not have a mind of their own, and cannot create; they only know and do as they are told. Eliza, the online therapist, although a poor and primitive example, will never be able to organically have a conversation because all of her responses are pre-programmed and there is a limit to what she can say and anticipate. The same goes for our computer giving us ads or recommendations for things we like based on our past history of what we have viewed. It can do a great job of simulating a human because it may guess correctly, but there really is so much it can say, because it doesn't know you or how you think. It only is able to give you back what you give it.

It is true, IBMers did wear blue: The Story of MS-DOS

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/waywewore/waywewore_30.html
Within the link you will see slides of the history of the company since its existence in 1911. Funny enough, they did in fact wear blue suits unlike anyone else.

Big Blue is a nickname for IBM. Big Blue refers to a former company dress code that required many IBM employees to wear only white shirts and many wore blue suits. IBM keyboards, typewriters, and some other manufactured devices have played on the "Big Blue" concept, using the color for enter keys and carriage returns. IBM has also used blue logos since 1947.

On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its new revolution in a box, the "Personal Computer" complete with a brand new operating system from Microsoft and a 16-bit computer operating system called MS-DOS 1.0.

In 1980, IBM first approached Bill Gates and Microsoft, to discuss the state of home computers and Microsoft products. Gates gave IBM a few ideas on what would make a great home computer, among them to have Basic written into the ROM chip. Microsoft had already produced several versions of Basic for different computer system beginning with the Altair, so Gates was more than happy to write a version for IBM.
However, at the time Bill Gates had never written an operating system for new computers and as a result of this Gates recommended that IBM tries another operating system called Control Program for Microcomputers. This system was written by a man named Gary Kildall of Digital Research.
During a meeting with Kildall IBM proposed a contract with him and he refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. As a result, IBM went back to Gates and Microsoft to ask them to write a new operating system, a system that eventually wiped Kildall's CP/M of use.
This is the story of how the Microsoft Disk Operating System or MS-DOS was created.

ashton kutcher (and the butterfly effect)

Norbert Weiner emphasized the fact that communication is control.  Communication is more than control.  Communication is the source of all life and the reasons people and things have evolved and matured into the society we have today.  Communication is present in all forms, whether its language, internet, binary code, or simple hand gestures.  Almost every movement of every day is based on our ability to communicate with one another and our surroundings.  Any type of major technology or cyborg created is because people are able to communicate and want to enhance our abilities to do so.  My favorite part of class yesterday was learning about the butterfly effect.  The butterfly effect is the theory that one simple flap of a butterflies wing can cause a tsunami on the other side of the world.  It is amazing how the smallest, most harmless gesture can cause chaos within something meant to be organized.  This also supports the chaos idea in our other class that any type of togetherness eventually ends up in entropy, no matter what happens.  Also, it was stated in class that every whole, or system, is always greater than the sum of its parts.  This does not mean, however, that each minimal part is not essential in keeping the system together.  Without each and every important part, the whole cannot function as perfectly as possible.

The first cyborg rodent

I was very intrigued by the idea of cyborgs, which we mentioned in class yesterday, so I decided to do some research and found that there actually are cyborgs in this world, though probably not the type that you would imagine. The first real living cyborg is a robot controlled by the brain of a rat. The robot is actually controlled via bluetooth connection, with the brain being able to both receive signals from and give signals to the robot. This means that it's not controlled just by the brain; the sensors of the robot are able to send signals to the brain telling it if it is about to hit a wall or other obstacle, and when those signals are received by the brain, it sends signals back to the robot moving it away from the wall or obstacle. The brains of these rats only last about three months inside the robot body so there have multiple brains used for the robot, each having a different "personality," or way of acting. If you want to check out a couple of videos about this cyborg rodent here are the links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcQ7ACgihAg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-iu6g

Why not always 'feedforward'?

Norbert Wiener said that "communication is control," and boy was he right. The 'science of control' was seemingly born straight from this; and along came the ideas of 'cyberspace,' 'cybernetics,' and more. We discussed feedback and defined it as: "information sent back from the receiver to the source." This is the key to a thermostat, for example (we talked about this). We briefly discussed 'feedforward,' which is "testing something out ahead of time." Thinking from a logical standpoint, I see endless uses for feedforward in general, some of which are obvious.
Feedforward helps one to open the channels of communication and tells one if another person is willing to communicate.
Feedforward messages/blog posts often allow us to preview the content. (eg.-blogger.com exemplifies this perfectly...I would say I preview a blog post 1 to 2 times on average.)
Feedforward can help estimate the receptivity of a person (say, on a dating website) regarding what one is going to talk with/ask for something. (eg.-before asking for a date, one would probably use feedforward to test the waters and see if one is likely to get a "yes" response.)
I could go on with examples all day, but I'll leave it at those three. Take a step back...why wouldn't any person or group of people not want to test something out ahead of time; thus so they can either know or predict future results? To a certain extent, there is no reason of why not--especially at first glance. But then again, we do have 'Chaos Theory' on the other hand...and along with it come some very contradictory ideas.

Some Outside Thoughts on Information Theory

I missed this class (Monday, July 11th); but I did get the notes from Arielle. I find the 19th century change of thought to be incredibly intriguing: Suddenly energy becomes the focus where previously matter had been the focus. This is comparably as big of a change in thought and awareness as, say, the world is round (not flat). What emerges is the idea that energy is the fundamental stuff of the universe. NOT MATTER...rather ENERGY. Matter is energy that's very stable, but everything adverts to energy. This was a time period when many great minds (like Einstein- 'E=MC squared' ) set out to create and test theories and ideas that might as well have been called magic (from 50 years prior, all the way back to the dawn of man kind.)
This line of thought continues, and then in the 1930s/40s we get the invention of the atomic bomb; which proved that splitting the atom destroys matter...matter is just the contained form of energy. The extent to which we might never understand, but on the other hand, we can take inventory of what we learn over the next 100 years-and see what we know then. If we're still here in 1,000 years-we'll know what we know then. It is very probable that some of our ideas and laws pertaining to science and nature will change in the future, but 'E=MC squared' seems like it will stick around forever.

411

Before last class I had never really sat down and thought about what information was. At first I was kind of confused because I was looking at it with such a narrow perspective, but by defining it as a measure of uncertainty and recognizing how subjective it really was, it became much more complex than what I believed it to be and helped me to understand it in such a different light. Shannon's theory also reiterated its purpose by telling us what we need to resolve uncertainty, and that information can be seen almost as a catalyst in moving towards order and away from entropy. I think it is so interesting to think how we innately have a tendency towards order, which made sense in the example of how your body tries to fight off cancer, a disease of entropy, like any other foreign body. It got me to thinking back in terms of technology as extensions of human function, and how all this information we are processing by means of technology, media, etc, which at times may seem unnatural, or excessive really just parallels our innate desire for more information and knowledge to eliminate uncertainly. In looking at this way, it may just be unavoidable.

"I Feel Fine" The Beatles (audio feedback)

After learning about feedback in class yesterday I found our discussion on audio feedback very interesting and decided to do some research on the topic. I found that audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback, which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input, (like a microphone or a guitar pickup) and an audio output (like a loudspeaker). In this example a signal is received by the microphone, then amplified and passed out of the loudspeaker. The sound from the loudspeaker can be received by the microphone again, amplified further, and then passed out through the loudspeaker. This action is repeated an uncountable amount of times and creates a very distinct sound. While audio feedback is usually unwanted it has entered into music as a desired effect. In Musical history, audio feedback has gone back to the beginning of the 1950’s. According to Allmusic’s Richie Unterberger, the very first use of feedback on a rock record is in the song “I Feel Fine” by The Beatles. Check it out at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpMs_R3P6U

To infinity ... and beyond!

As I was watching tv last night I saw that there was a term used that we just learned about the other day in class. check it out and respond if you know what the answer may be. (its fairly easy) http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/video_elvis_featured_in_new_infiniti_tv_commercial.shtml