Exotic Universe
The depths of space
So You Want to Make an App
Companies Catering to a Mobile Market
x o B k c a l B Tech of Tomorrow
The way technology advances
Will you adopt me? Go to the Town Lake Animal Center to find your own special angel. (512) 978-0500 or 3-1-1 for animal issues after hours or (512) 974-2000 if outside Austin City limits
Black Box Bios
pg:4
LFE
pg:5
So You Want to Make an App
By:Henry Mateer
pg:6-8
The Science of Jobs
By:James Mulhern
pg:12-14
Tech of Tomorrow
By:Bennet Leff
pg:18-20
Alt. Story Forms
pgs:10-11, 16-17, 22-23
x o B INFORMATION k c a l B
Cover Photo courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory
Page 3-BlackBox- TOC
READ MORE: INVASIVE SPECIES WHAT BELONGS? page 13
by Ryan Hagerty, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
To our most valued reader,
To turn every LASA student into a science and technology brain box. That is our goal and we expect to succeed, through this medium. We will approach this challenge one step at a time, one publication at a time. We begin with this magazine to spread knowledge about more than just the so called three states of matter, or say that stars are shaped like pentagrams. We want to make sure that all students know that there nearly infinite states of matter, and stars are really giant glowing balls of plasma. We decided to spread knowledge across high school students and educate about the higher level science. We live in a world, where children don’t know much about the outside-Space, or the depths of the ocean. We hope we can educate the world, in order to make a more intelligent, more reaPage 4-BlackBox- LFE
sonable place, where everyone can work together. We’re a group of knowledgeable students who hope we can give everyone the opportunities we had, and make a world full of brain boxes.
The Editors: JM, HM, BL
Bios James - The creepiest kid in the school, he also has some interests. He is part of the marching band, and that’s it. When he is doing something it is usually reading or watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. When he is not doing either of these things he is probably playing online games that he found while searching the internet. He also greatly enjoys watching astronomy documentaries on YouTube.
Henry - Not only the shortest blond kid in LASA, but also a member of the Ezine group Black Box. He loves to participate in golf and Latin club after school. When he is not doing this he is outside on the greenbelt directly behind his house doing research, marking wildlife populations, and just enjoying nature. he also likes to ride his bike at the bmx trail, play paintball with his friends, and going down to galveston for the weekend. He has been very connected to the outdoor world growing up on Ladybird Lake, and later in life on the edge of the greenbelt. With this childhood he learned to respect nature and is now extremely interested in biology.
Bennet - Not just the guy with the most mismanaged hair on campus, Bennet also attends LASA. He enjoys taking apart and rebuilding just about anything that electricity flows through. When he’s not questioning why companies put certain parts in their computers, he enjoys working in Photoshop, and Cinema 4D on the weekends. He also likes walking, listening to music and throwing frisbee at lunch. When reading, you’ll find him with a copy of Wired or Lifehacker up on his screen. Growing up next to the tracks, he’s had a hard life, but it’s the life he was born with. Page 5-BlackBox- BIOS
Top 20 Programs To Make Media
1. Adobe
2.
Adobe photoshop is our numer one tool for photo manipulation.
Cinema 4D is our favorite program for 3d modeling. Maxon
3.
The latest Final Cut, has a rich, familiar interface. Apple
4. Ableton
Ableton is our favorite for getting a tune out of our heads.
Many people would like to make something. Whether it’s music, photos or web design, we’ve got it covered. 1.Photoshop - produced by the software giant Adobe, has been in the industry since 1990. It has since become the go to program for photo manipulation, texture creation, and has even streched its bounds to 3D. Photoshop is an incredibly versitile program and has developed a vast suite of tools. It’s in almost every artist’s tool box and there are few reasons why it shouldn’t be number one. 2.Cinema 4D - Cinema 4D is a 3D modeling application, despite its name. It’s slowly rising above many of its competitors to be one of the industry’s most used programs. It has a simple-to-learn interface and is great for graphic design. In its newest revision - R14, sculpting has been added to its already long list of functionalities. It can also be used to keyframe video and as a compositing application. 3.Final Cut - has propelled Final Cut to one of the most used tools in the film editing industry. Final Cut is so popular, other applications include Final Cut shortcuts just for ease of use, and familiarity. Final Cut is also a non-distructive editing program, which means it doesn’t necessarilly edit the actual film file itself. Instead it tells itself to apply edits when running. 4.Ableton Live - Ableton is a sound design and DJing software package. It was originally aimed at DJs but it’s been adopted by many producers in most every genre. It now offers many tools for normal producing but still keeps its old djing functionalities, with a few new edits to the djing department as well. 5.DreamWeaver - Another solution put out by Adobe. Dreamweaver is well known
as a tool for web development. It’s the one of the most used tools for programming web pages, not necessarilly to be confused with designing the layout, but making it viewable, and accessible. Dreamweaver is a great solution for web development and has an endless list of features for easier web design. 6.Autodesk Maya - Maya is a 3D modeling program and is highly regarded in the entertainment industry. Maya or its brother program 3ds Max have probably been used on many films viewed in the theatre. Maya is an industry standard and has some great features. It greatly utilizes its physics engine and also has some good IK (inverse kinematics) features. 7.Autodesk 3ds Max - 3ds Max is Maya’s counterpart. It’s common in film, but has a large presence in games. It’s also common in architecture and special effects. It has a great set of animation tools and even has a built-in scripting language that artists can use to extend functionality. Finally, Max comes with mental ray a powerful rendering engine. 8.After Effects - After Effects is yet another program put out by Adobe that has become an industry standard. It’s a motion graphics and compositing program. It works mainly in 2d and 2.5d. It’s used to do effects in film and it has a huge library of effects. It’s part of Adobe’s Creative Suite 6, and isn’t going anywhere. It’s a sure tool to find on any artists computer who works with film, motion grapics, or effects. 9.Illustrator - Illustrator is the final Adobe product we’ll be talking about. Illustrator has a fantastic set of tools for graphic design. Illustrator is a vector design program unlike photoshop. Illustrator is much better about capturing user input
and using it compared to most other Adobe products. In CS6, Adobe’s updated the graphics engine to the Mercury graphics engine, ensuring performance boosts. 10.Blender - Blender is a free, open source 3d modeling program. Blender also offers features such as 3d tracking and even footage editing. If you’re looking for an open source piece of software that is a complete solution, Blender is your best option. In combination with other design programs, Blender can be a powerful tool and should not be looked over just because it’s free. In fact because it’s free it should be something you go and download a copy of. 11.GIMP - GIMP like Blender is free and open source. GIMP is a image manipulation program and is similar to photoshop in it’s functionality. GIMP might not always be as powerful as Photoshop but being free certainly doesn’t hurt GIMP. However, even though GIMP may fall short in some categories it certainly is fully capable of producing high qualilty edits. 12.Audacity - To finalize our streak of free, open source software I’ve included Audacity. Audacity is a great program for editing sound files. Audacity supports for some very extreme recording environments and situations. Audacity also has little hardware or file limitations, because it’s compatible with most anything you’d ever need. 13.Logic 9 - Logic is a music production program. It offers a time flex feature which is quite impressive. It’s used by artists all around the globe. One of it’s best features is its interface which in my opinion is matched by no other. It’s incredibly easy to start making music in and with a few quick tricks churning out quick beats
is easier than ever. 14.Coda - Panic the company behind the Coda has just put out a new version of Coda that has a richer feature set than the last and that’s saying something. Coda is a web development tool with tools that make it easier than ever to get your files connected to your FTP. Coda is almost solely based around web development but can be extended to code in other similar languages. 15.Unity3d - Unity3d is probably one of the lesser known programs on this list. Unity is a game development engine. It’s a program that allows you to combine code and models aswell as sound and textures to make interactible environments. The Unity team just released Unity 4 an impressive revision to the Unity line. They just released the mechanim tool to make character rigging, animation, and control easier than ever. Mechanim is a great tool for programmers and animators alike as it allows more flexibility to the whole development team. 16.Autodesk Smoke - Smoke is becoming a much better platform for film editing than in the past. Smoke used to be a clunky program but has since improved in most areas. The development team over at Autodesk took input from users of other programs and made smoke and incredibly flexible interface for all artists and editors who’d like to try out a new program. 17.zBrush - zBrush by pixologic is an incredible program that is used in studios for almost any type of media. ZBrush has an amazing modeling and sculpting workflow. Its sculpting abilities are unmatched by any competitor. 18.Protools - Protools is the most used audio recording and manipution program in the industry. It can be found in any
studio and has been used by some of the top artists of the past decade. 19.Avid - Avid is produced by the same company that puts out protools. Avid is an editing program that has been used by the pros for years. 20.Nuke - To cap off our list, we’ve got Nuke, a great 3d compositing program used in every studion.
Page 8-11-BlackBox- Jobs
The Science of Jobs One career option amongst many.
Brittany Hopkins is a freshman biology teacher at the Liberal Arts and Science Academy, having been teaching there for the past three years she enjoys being at that school. Before becoming a teacher, Ms. Hopkins worked in a stem cell research lab as an undergrad in genetic studies, one of the most powerful branches of biology, Hopkins thinks. There she experimented on mice in a research job, while working to obtain a major in biology. It is common to see undergrads working in a research lab, but why did she not continue in a research lab after getting the major in biology? “Bench jobs” are jobs where research scientists get young undergraduates as assistants to work in research labs. The undergrads try to create experiments to eventually get recognition and their own research lab. Similarly, post-doctorates, or postdocs, are where scientists with their PhD get jobs with other scientists and work in similar conditions as undergraduates with low wages. It used to be that these post-docs took one or two years to finish, but now it is not rare to see research scientists spending five to seven years, or even ten years in
post-docs. According to the American Chemistry Society, 62% of PhD graduates in chemistry during 2011 did not have a job in their area of study, and according to NSF only 14% of PhD graduates in biology have an academic position. Getting a lab to work solo is difficult, and anything other than research in science rarely appears, with the exception of physiology, with only a 2% unemployment rate. One job that is more accessible than having a research lab or traveling around the world to study habitats as an ecologist is being a teacher. Teaching is a highly impactful job, and education, being a pillar of society, is an important job and highly respected. In addition, teaching is usually required somewhere, because teachers are one job that is always needed. Even with budget cuts, math and science are subjects that are always in some demand. For example the American Jobs Act and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act were designed to keep teachers in schools. The reason Hopkins became a science teacher was because she enjoyed science. “I enjoyed learning sciPage-BlackBox-____________ Page 8-11-BlackBox- Jobs
ence all throughout school” she says, and the reason she became a high school teacher was because she had an interview at LASA, even though she originally wanted to teach at a middle school. While being interviewed for the job, she mentionedshe was looking for a job in middle school, but was told she would be teaching freshmen. Being a freshman teacher was “getting the best of both worlds,” because children are coming out of middle school, and getting challenged at the level of a high school.
for the first time, but grow up so much when they School become upper- Ms. Hopkins in her science classroom Photographer classmen. On the other hand “the way freshmen are different from the upperclassmen.... freshmen tend to be anxious about every little thing,” This is what Hopkins thinks is the worst part about being a freshman teacher.
The way I get to be challanged daily
She says one of the best things about being a freshman science teacher is that she gets to see everyone grow up as they go through high school. According to Hopkins, another strong point is “the way I actually get to be challenged on a daily basis,” because the level of intellect in the classroom forces her to learn as she teaches kids. Being a freshmen teacher is a great path according to Hopkins, because you see the kids grow as they pass through high school, not just meeting them near the end of their high school career, where a teacher sees them as adults. “The thing I’m going to really look forward to, is seeing everyone grow up,” Hopkins says, because, according to her, “freshmen are...tiny” when they get to school
Page-BlackBox-____________ Page 8-11-BlackBox- Jobs
“Freshmen are scared of the homework load and workload in general and will cause extreme anxiety in freshmen, making us tense, while in other times we are sluggish and sleepy making [freshmen]...difficult to approach.” Clara Bishop, a freshman, says.
Hopkins thinks that as soon as freshmen become upperclassmen, they know what to expect and are much more relaxed and approachable. “As they [high school students] get a little older they get a little bit more chill,” Hopkins says. “The best part about biology... [is] understanding how the world works, how you work.” she says,
when referring to why major in biology. Chemistry is another subject that is very interesting and worth studying, something she discovered in college. “When I went to college, I discovered how fascinating chemistry was, and I almost ended up getting a minor in chemistry....I would be ok with teaching chemistry.” she says. Continuing through college can reveal things to a person with a major in any science. By continuing through college, one could also discover more subjects to learn, or even possibly teach. It is similar to biology, but the difference is one controls life and every aspect of it, and chemistry is based around what everything is made of. Beside seeing kids grow up, and usually learning with the students, teaching is a job with difficulties. Besides keeping the kids reined in, a teacher has to keep working outside of school. “It’s not one of those jobs you just go home and relax,” Ms. Hopkins says. Being a teacher requires more than 40 hours of work, because according to the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers work an average of more than 46 hours, both in and out of school. What comes first is grading, later planning the next day’s lesson, resulting in not much time for relaxing, thus being a high school teacher you get almost no personal time. Besides that you have the dangers of school, which include bunsen burners, which will cause severe burns, a necessary risk to take during class. When being a science teacher, whether it’s biology, chemistry or physics, there are many benefits: learning new things, or seeing previous students grow up. But there is also an exhausting part to teaching, which includes no time to relax, no personal time or having much of a life outside of school, along with having to control the kids and using dangerous things in school. Teaching is a job with pros and cons, as compared to a research lab, with more cons than pros. That is why Ms. Hopkins went on to teach at a high school, instead of continuing with a research lab.
Page 8-11-BlackBox- Jobs
Invasive Species What Belongs? The effect of the Bullfrog:
photo by: Gabriel Kamener
The bullfrog is a large predatory frog. It will eat any animal that fits into its mouth, even other bullfrogs! They compete with native predators and have a large impact on prey populations. This is an example of an introduced species that has had a large negative effect.
What Snakeheads are doing to tributaries:
photo by: Hines Robert W, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
This is a large carnivorous fish that is highly aggressive. It will attack anything that moves, not always eating it. They are one of the largest fish inside of the Florida tributaries and use that to their advantage. They have no natural predators and run ramped killing off any native species in their way.
photo by: Hagerty Ryan, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
How a tropical visitor can be a good neighbor:
photo by: Jim Lynch
This is an example of an introduced species that has no significant impact. The monk parakeets are the only parrots that build their own nest. They get most of their food from bird feeders and have only indirect competition with native fauna.
How Water Hyacines hurt the ecosystem:
photo by: Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
When not controlled, water hyacinth can cover entire lakes and ponds. This dramatically impacts the natural water flow, blocks the sunrays from reaching native aquatic plants below, and deoxygenates the water, often killing the aquatic life below. The plants also create a prime habitat for mosquitos, a commonplace vector of disease, and a species of snail known to host a parasitic flatworm that causes schistosomiasis (snail fever) by creating large areas of standing stagnant water.
Page 14-17-BlackBox-App
Photos by Henry Mateer
So You Want to Make an App By: Henry Mateer
F
rom Angry Birds to Around me (a mobile map app that allows you to search businesses around you), mobile apps can entertain you on the go, or help you finish work. When an owner creates an app, they need to take into account many different factors, such as who the consumer is, what device they are using, and how many people can buy this app. “There are more and more apps being developed because there are more people in the world using mobile devices to connect to the Internet than are using desktops and that [number] will only continue to grow,” said Josh Sklar, president of Heresy, a virtual full-service advertising agency with clients like AMD, Microsoft and Rutgers. With all of these people connecting with mobile devices, a huge consumer base eggs developers on to create more mobile apps. However, if the developer wants the app to be bought they need to make it solve a problem that people may be having. “There needs to be a raison d’être (a pretentious way of saying “a reason for the existence”) of the app. It will not be successful if it merely gratuitously exists for its own sake and is not solving a problem real people are having,”Sklar said. Deb Gabor, president of Sol Marketing Concepts agrees that the app needs to solve a real problem, “They need to find a group of people with a problem that they can fix, then fix it in a way that
will work for a long period of time.” Charels Haggas, Ceo of Space Chimp Media, a creative digital marketing agency disagrees, saying that all that needs to be made is an app that will attract consumers, “You don’t need to always solve a problem. What problem does Angry Birds solve? But you do need to create a great app. You need to keep people engaged and coming back to drive revenue via in app purchases or ads. Yes, it is a feasible business model. However, paid apps are very hard to turn into a viable business due to the low volume of downloads and low average revenue per user. A free model that generates a high volume of in app purchases or ad impressions is much more preferable over the long term. However, some developers have a hard time coming to terms with giving their app away for free.”
Technology is king on the mobile Internet
When a company makes a product they need to work with other companies to make it compatible with multiple devices. With so many internet capable devices such as iPhones BlackBerrys iPads Nooks and kindles to name a few, it can be challenging to make a product that works on all of them. Some companies make their product compatible with as many as possible (like Fruit Ninja), while others make their product so good that they make people buy whatever Page 14-17-BlackBox-App
Photos by Jennifer Lipshy
“There needs to be a raison d’être (a pretentious way of saying “a reason for the existence”) of the app. It will not be successful if it merely gratuitously exHow do people make ists for its own sake money with mobile apps? “It’s not enough to put an app and is not solving a in the various App Stores. A problem real people marketing budget needs to be set aside to raise awareness for the app are having.” they device it is compatible with(such as many apple products). “When it comes to an app, specifically, the company needs to be aware of technical considerations that surround code developed for the native operations system (e.g., iOS, Symbian, Android, Windows 8) vs code built using a system that allows you to write once and output to multiple operating systems. There are tradeoffs for doing it either way that may have a future impact that needs to be planned for,” Sklar said.
amongst the target audiences in a way that they will actually pay attention to it. A brand needs to be developed and that takes thinking, time, and money for execution of various marketing and advertising campaigns,” Haggas said He also believes that using ad net-
Page 14-17-BlackBox-App
works to have ads place in your app is another way to increase revenue, “you can join an ad network and have ads placed in various areas of your app. If people see them or click, you can make different amounts of money. You can charge an amount of money for the app in the App Stores, knowing that the stores take a hefty percentage. You can possibly charge a subscription depending on what you are offering.”
An industry making lots of changes
Sklar said, “It is still such a new industry that people are learning on the fly. Apple introduced the “iAd” a year or so ago that provides a more rich experience for interacting with advertisements, but it hasn’t been very successful. There are more and more apps being developed because there are more people in the world using mobile devices
to connect to the Internet than are using desktops and that will only continue to grow.” Haggas said he is seeing a lot of changes in the way apps are “sold,” moving from paid apps towards free apps. “Apple actually never intended for apps to be so cheap. However, that’s what the market dictated. One of our clients (Starmap) launched with the opening of the app store in partnership with Apple. He sold millions of units for $18 a piece. Hence, he did very well. However, he now has a free app as well as a paid app because the number of downloads he is getting has been depressed by the number of free offerings in the space.”
Making it work
Once the basics have been planned, he says you need to go in-depth into the technological aspect, “The mobile platforms that the app is going to live on need to be thought through in terms of the sizes of the various screens, their resolution, whether they have a gyroscope built in or other features that may be necessary, how fast the Internet connection is on the device, etc.”
Who cares? Mobile apps and the fight for the dollar
Many people have figured out how todays app market works. They know what they need to take into account when introducing a new product. But the app market is changing constantly every day. Just think, who even knew what an app was five years ago.
“I have been working developing online communities and monitoring online behaviors since 1981,” said Sklar. “I have worked as the global creative director for some of the largest advertising agencies in the world and I have specialized in the “digital” part of advertising and marketing since 1995. So it is by trial and error over many years that have enabled me to understand what is effective. Every company needs an experienced person to advise or steer them – or they need to start small and see what works, then grow upon that.” Haggas advises hiring a marketing agency that knows what it is doing will help create buzz about an app, “Hire a marketing agency that understands how to drive awareness and buzz around an application. Do research. Quora.com is a great forum to learn from other app developers that may have the same problems as you”
Doing it right: free or paid
Experts understand that mobile app creation is a business, “They understood that creating a mobile app is a business that you need to innovate and build over time. It’s not a get rich scheme,” said haggas
Doing it wrong: the price of making mistakes
Apps are not a get rich quick scheme Haggas believes, “If you are trying to get rich quick, you should just walk away. Sure you may be that guy that has that one in a million fluke success, but most apps are quite expensive to develop and take hard work and dedication to achieve. Oftentimes, development costs for a good app can run upwards of $50,000+ $100,000+ and this doesn’t include upgrades. Spending this kind of money on a gamble can be devastating to a lot of novices and just isn’t worth it,” Sklar thinks preparation is key, and the poorest decision is to not look into what you are going to do, “The worst way is to not do your research, to not think things through and sketch them out before you jump into it, to not have a project plan that lays out a budget and timeline with everyone’s roles and responsibilities written down and perfectly clear. To not have constant communication between the front end design and user experience teams with the back end developers who are writing the code. There should be one person in charge who makes the final decisions after weighing the input from the specialists on the team.”
Page 14-17-BlackBox-App
Exotic Universe
8 most amazing things in Space
The Earth is an impressive creation only because life exists on that small lump of rock in the vast universe. And life on this planet may not be unique, as we still find new planets every year. Not even liquid water is unique to this planet, some Super-Earths have been found to have supercritical water on the surface Butterfly Nebula is from an exceptionally hot parent star: 250,000 degrees. Planetary Nebulae are beautiful explosions, short lived explosions, lasting only 50,000 years or so. The nearest nebula to us is the Helix Nebula at nearly 450 light years away, but in 5 billion years, the Sun will also become a planetary nebula and die as a white dwarf. Fermi Bubble is a recent discovery by the Fermi
Earth, courtesy of NASA
Butterfly Nebula, courtesy of NASA
Hot Jupiter, HD 149026b courtesy of NASA
Fermi Bubble, courtesy NASA
Gamma Ray Telescope. This particular Fermi Bubble is very near us: in the center of the Milky Way. A fermi bubble is high energy electron interacting with low energy photons to produce gamma rays. The gamma rays go in every direction but are more common at the poles. No one knows where the electrons are coming from.
Quasars are supermassive black holes that eat everything around them, or within the event horizon. Anything inside the event horizon and not even light can escape, but outside of the even horizon you’re safe, except the gamma rays and X-rays shooting out because of the violence while shredding nearby stars.
Planets around other stars are interesting because only recently have they been found with more frequency than ever, mainly because we now believe in other planets and we have more powerful telescopes and computers, the better to find them with. Some planets actually have water, like 55 Cancri E: it has supercritical water; or Hot Jupiters which are several times the size of Jupiter, and orbit very close to their host star making them hot.
The Horsehead Nebula is a large dust cloud in the constellation Orion. The nebula could be a low mass star nursery, due to large amounts of hydrogen gas in the cloud. Neutron Stars are the results of Supernovae. The stars that create supernovae are 8 to 10 times larger than our sun, and the collapse of these compress neutrons and compress protons and electrons until they become neutrons. Eventually, because neutrons repulse each other slightly, they can compress the mass 1.3 solar masses into the size of Manhattan, making the gravitational pull immense.
Quasar, courtesy of NASA
Horsehead Nebula, courtesy of NASA
Neutron Star, courtesy of NASA
Page 20-22-BlackBox- Tech
Tech of Tommorow Bennet Leff
Technology is changing every day and as it has surprised us in the past, will it surprise us in the future? There are many fields where computers are becoming more and more impressive. Over 40 years ago, Intel co-found, Gordon Moore, opined, every year and a half, the speed of computers will double. Now known as Moore’s laws, there’s been some question is recent years whether Moore’s Law can sustain itself. If not, this would mean a fleet of bad things for the computer market and our own ability to continue to advance in sciences. However Ben Chapman, the Assistant Dean of Information Technology, at Emory Law School, says otherwise. “No. There is no indication that things like Moore’s Law are showing any signs of slowing.” If Moore’s Law isn’t slowing down that could mean some interesting things for the future of technology. It would mean that for at least the next few decades we would see technology continue to grow at its current exponential rate. The way technology and especially computer technology is growing is very different than that of other sciences like medicine. For instance we make breakthroughs in medicine because it facilitates human’s lives. In computer sciences though, it’s very different. Chapman says “I’m not sure most technology - at this point in time - is ‘necessary’. It’s still useful and valuable and makes our lives easier than they would oth-
erwise be.” Basically in computer science technology evolves because humans want to make life easier and more efficient and there’s a huge market based around it. It doesn’t evolve out of a human need. No one actually needs newer versions of Microsoft Word, but most people would like for it to be easier to use. Computers aren’t just making lives easier in the modern world. Children who could never afford a computer are learning to code in Python on Raspberry Pis. However, with so many people on the internet privacy is becoming an issue. According to the National Cyber Security Alliane “15% of Americans have never checked their social networking privacy and security account settings.” With over a third of all Facebook users being 13 or under, internet privacy isn’t something to look away from. Clearly, in a world where more and more, everybody has a computer, many people aren’t checking to see if they are safe. However Chapman says that it isn’t as bad as the numbers seem. “It is likely that in this interconnected world, the [youth’s] generation will tolerate sharing more ‘private’ information than their parents’ generation. They will also be more sophisticated about protecting the things that they really think are private.” Chapman suggests that while the current youngest generation will post more personal information on the internet, they will also be better about keeping safe Page 20-22-BlackBox- Tech
what they really want secure. Computers becoming more and more available to less traditional consumers will certainly have its consequences, but what about the consumers who expect the newest technology every year. Consumers like to be impressed by the newest everything. If Moore’s Law doesn’t slow down, how will people continue to be impressed by the technologies of the future? Chapman says, “We always have a sense of wonder. You can always make something smaller, faster, prettier, than its predecessor.” There has always been an answer to the predecessor. Look at the modern day smart phone. A smart phone contains a camera, a computer, a phone, an MP3 player, and a gaming console, all into one device. A few decades ago that
wouldn’t have been a feasible task, and it was only 2008 when the iPhone was unveiled. There are a few countries that could become the next revolutionary producer of technology. Chapman believes that China will be the next big producer of electronics, more so than it already is. Chapman also says “Speech to text and text to speech are finally moving ahead very rapidly. The things that you can do with Google Voice or Siri are just amazing.” This is another example of a technology that is made not out of necessity but a desire for efficiency in people’s lives.
“Speech to text and text to speech are finally moving ahead very rapidly.”
Page 20-22-BlackBox- Tech
Much of the future of technology will actually be guided by where consumers put their money.
ATH-M50S The BESTin Sound
Parker Pens Pure Perfection