Blog on twitter Hashtag system

For my next blog, I will be discussing my use of the twitter #hashtag system. I used this system to get help and to help others with the Swarm Software. The program was difficult to use because there were no directions with the software. This was my first time using the hashtag system to communicate with others on twitter. I found it a very interesting way to communicate with people because the hashtag opens up users to communicate with everyone using the hashtag in their tweets, even if they do not know them, by simply adding the hashtag to their post. I used the hashtag to help others use the swarm program. I believe that others posts about their experience helped me find a head start since the program was difficult to figure out. I used my hashtag to give out information every time I accomplished something on the program, for instance I believe that the F action marker had to be put on the board before the M marker because the arrow indicating the direction of the action was going from F to M, so this would complete the cycle of actions and get the ants to cross over the bridge. This was just a guess though from my own experience so I actually could have been wrong and could potentially actually hinder people’s advancement in the program. I never could get all of my ants over, so I do not really know if that was true. I tried to give as much input as I could in case someone was close to figuring out the program and needed a little more experimentation to solve the problem. I thought that there was not enough input from other people that was helping me figure out the program.

            I think that the hashtag system is a good way to communicate among individuals in a scenario like this where people who may not know each other need to work together to solve a complex problem. The hashtag system allowed everyone to communicate and share any information they had on one page for everyone to see. The open community of the hashtag system is more efficient that a small group because it expands to an infinite number of views that search the hashtag. I believe it is more efficient than a lecture as well because in a lecture room, with many people talking and moving around, it can get hectic and hard to communicate. It may be faster is some ways since everyone is at 1 place, but the hashtag system puts all the information in one place for everyone to see.

Swarming technology 10/26

Today’s blog will focus on the articles that discuss using ants and other insects as models for solving complex problems in the digital world. Scientists are using ants as models because colonial insects have the unique ability to solve daily problems they experience by working together toward a common goal. This kind of colonial symbiosis is rare anywhere in the world, and even more rare is the animal’s ability to cooperate with each other as a colony. One way that these insects are used is the problem of the “traveling salesman”, or the shortest route between a large numbers of points. Ants are studied for this problem because ants seem like they can systematically find the shortest route between points in nature using their pheromone trails they leave behind. Another way that the ants are being used is they are being studied so that engineers can build small robots to do sophisticated tasks. This is useful because it is low cost and is an easy way to solve more difficult problems. Instead of building a large complex robot that is still out of our technological reach, many small bots can be made that we are able to build. Another way to use ants is they are being used in digital networks by leaving a “digital pheromone”, or bits of information, on the web to leave a chain that can be remapped and rerouted. Another way that the ants could be used is we could use ants to complete complex digital tasks by incorporating many people that are good at a certain aspect of the problem and together have the whole group work in their strengths to move toward a common goal. Another way that insects can be used to solve complex problems is by using swarm theories to build complex defense networks that are almost impenetrable by hackers or digital thieves. Instead of traditionally using one central server for things, using many small servers that are highly regulated and complex may make it harder to retrieve information or to accomplish many more tasks. If we used many small servers it may also be easier and less chaotic if something goes down on the server to fix the problem than if someone is trying to fix a large complex server.

Is Facebook a Superorganism?

After reading the articles on super organisms, I believe that Facebook is not a super organism. The articles presented how super organisms are constructed and how every member in the colony has a job to carry out or else the colony will fail to survive. I do not believe Facebook is similar to these colonies. Facebook is a social tool that can be used to communicate, advertise, and keep in touch with others. It follows along with the super organism theory in the way that Facebook is made up of all its members and would not be what it is today without all of its members, but I believe it differs in the way the “organism” works. The insect colonies are made up of different groups or “castes” of organisms that fulfill their duties. When each group fulfills their duties, then the colony is able to carry out its reproduction duties and flourish. The online community of Facebook does not have the same type of hierarchy among its users working toward a main goal. It is simply a tool used for communication and advertising. Another thing to note is that the insects that make up a super organism lack a limbic system or any type of complex neural arrangement. This means that ants do not have emotions or feelings, they are simply hardwired organisms, similar to computers in the way they can carry out tasks but do not have any kind of emotional feeling. Humans, on the other hand, have emotions and they can have “selfish” feelings that prevent them from working together toward a common goal. Therefore, I believe it is rare that humans of any sort to be able to be as efficient as these organisms. An example would be a restaurant. A restaurant depends on its cooks, waiters, dishwashers, and management to be successful. How many people that are dishwashers go to work every day wanting to work as hard as they can so that the restaurant flourishes, but most dishwashers in reality hate their job for the most part and only do what is required to make their minimum wage and go home. The dishwashers are selfish and only care about themselves. I believe this from experience being a dishwasher myself and having many friends that work in the restaurant business. Humans are too caught up in their own agenda’s to be able to carry out the responsibility that requires for a complete hierarchical system to work. The only case I can see that humans could arrange a super organism type network is in sports, where the success of the team requires every member to do their best. Therefore, I do not believe that Facebook represents any kind of super organism, because there is no hierarchy of workers working toward a common goal.

Microblog experience

For class today I surfed some microblogs from China. The microblogs from Weibo.com seemed to focus more on the personal lives of the people. I thought the microblogs were similar to facebook in the sense that most of the people stated what was on their minds at a certain time or what they were doing. The people would also post pictures that they had seen with a comment on that scene. The people also discussed music and personal feelings on certain topics. Political discussion was limited on this site, but there were some blogs that were all politics. Anchor Rui's blog was all political, and his main blogs were on a meeting he had with Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama and on his interviews. Most of his blogs were interviews he had with powerful political people. I would be interested in following Rui's blog because he went in depth into the lives of many people that are known worldwide. Weibo was hard for me to understand how the blogs work. Since the language was in Chinese, the chinese slang or the way they speak was difficult for me to understand so it would be hard for me to communicate with them. I believe that the ways the Chinese communicate is very different. I would like to ask them just basic facts about their life. I would want to ask how they are educated, and why they think the way they do. It is interesting to me to see how other people live their lives and how they think.

the great firewall of China

Based on what I have read, the Chinese government takes many radical steps to control online activism in China. The government has several methods that they use to cover everything  so that anything they want can be censored.  The great firewall of China project was established in the late 1990’s and enforced beginning in early 2003 as a project setup for online enforcement. Everything from IP address blocking to email disrupting is employed. Some of the methods used to regulate the internet are IP address blocking, where the access to certain IP addresses area denied. If the target website is on a shared server, then the whole server is shut down, so no websites from that sever can be accessed. The only way around this IP address block is by targeting the proxies, but again  these may also be shut down or blocked. Another method used is DNS filtering and redirection. This method changes the domain of the site, funneling the person into a new domain and by disrupting what websites are accessible. If the IP address is accessible, then the website can still be seen by using the IP address instead of the domain. Another method used is URL filtering, which will use select keywords in the URL to find sites and block them. The problem with this is that sites can be obtained by using symbolism in the keywords or by making sure not enough information is given away in the URL so that the site Is targeted.  Yet another filtering method is packet filtering, which terminates TCP packet information when certain keywords are found. This method is useful when searching results of a topic entered into a search engine. Ways of getting around this are reducing the amount of information that is entered into the packet by editing the TCP/IP stacks. The final method is to reset the connection or block the connection, where any attempts to retrieve information from a site will lead to a 30minute ban on attempting to connect to the web. This is usually circumvented by avoiding the reset packet issued by the firewall.

Twitter activity

This blog will discuss my twitter activity. On twitter, I saw how the reporters on China discussed corruption among its politics, from taxpayers being ripped off to politicians being arrested after political victories. Louisa Lim mentioned a tweet about how she was visiting the BBC page and it went blank for 30 seconds, and she remarked "I wonder what is being censored". SeeingredChina posted numerous tweets about information on the internet that put out percentages of organ donors being from executed prisoners, and he questioned that authority of those tweets. these tweets prove how little faith the people of china have in the information they read from sources. Tom from seeingredchina also posted a blog article making refrence to the great firewall of china.

blog on activism case 10/7

This article discussed how Netizens use certain tactics to get the attention of other netizens. In case 1 of Yang’s article the murder of a student in Beijing was analyzed. The students in college use online and offline networks to communicate with each other. The Chinese use these networks for sharing all kinds of information. The information about the murder of the student entered into one of these private communities where from there the information spread out into several other communities and eventually landed on the offline communities where this information spread rapidly and students could protest among themselves. Information was all online in this case, as there was no mass media involvement, so all information was spreading online. There was a struggle in this case to keep these online communities open so that more information could be shared because there was a threat of the communities being shut down by the university. There was a lot of protest from the university and its moderators to regulate the information, but the moderators felt like they had to obey the students freedom of speech. This case shows the struggle between information sharing on the internet, as people try to spread information as fast as possible before it is censored. By the time the media published information, it was censored and fabricated. The protestors use symbolism like poems to express certain aspects of the person, like a beautiful poem to express a persons innocence. Leverage was internet in this case because the only source of information was the internet. Accountability focused on individual rights and freedom of speech. The university tried to cover the story up by editing information posted online, thus provoking the people to claim that their rights are being revoked.