Posts

China Bans Foreign Technology

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China is a country that is plagued with speculation from government officials. It's no secret that the Chinese government want their entire population to be kept in the dark on certain issues. This has led them to ban several "Western" news outlets and technology. Ideally the Chinese government doesn't want anything that is not Chinese in their country, news, technology, ISP's and everything where the general public could find out things about China that the government doesn't want them to know. China has banned sites such as Facebook, The Intercept, YouTube, All Google Services, Twitter, Dropbox, Foursquare and Flickr (BBC). There are also several news sites, such as CNN, that are allowed, but with a catch. The CNN broadcasting for China comes from a satellite, that is owned by the Chinese government. This means the news segments are altered or cut out by Chinese officials depending on if it meets their guidelines or not. This is the same with all America...

The Dangers of 5G

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5G is a revolutionary new technology with speeds ranging from 50mb/s to over 1gb/s. Most people will have access to mid-band 5G which will deliver speeds from 100-400 mb/s. This sounds great and all but the fact is, we don't know enough about 5G. 5G is short for 5th Generation, which is better than 4G which is better than 3G and so on. Each generation gets leaps and bounds faster than the previous generation. With 5G the wavelengths are shorter, this allows for faster speeds but greatly reduced range and power. Studies have shown that things like buildings, trees or even rain in between your 5G phone, and the nodes (the transmitters of the cellular data) can often greatly reduce speeds or cancel them out all together. 134 Proposed 5G Small Cell Nodes Planned For The City Of Lafayette, Several Already In Place To fix this problem, cellular providers will have to place these nodes very frequently and have them transmit with insane amounts of power. This is where the public ge...

Social Media is Ultimately Good for Society

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Cal Newport, an associate professor at the Georgetown University argues that people should quit social media. This claim is backed by the fact that he is a well known author, professor and blogger but has no social media accounts. His claim is that nobody needs social media and it is more of a time waster than anything. I disagree with that claim. Social media obviously has some downsides, but overall social media is so widespread, YouTube for people that make videos, Twitter for people that want to express their opinion online, Facebook for people that want to keep in touch with relatives or friends, LinkedIn for professional businesses and people with professional profiles. All these companies and platforms make it easier than ever to get and stay in touch, from your personal relations to finding a job or hiring someone. These companies and platforms also have great other things, YouTube doubles as an online streaming service, Facebook has their own local buy-and-sell platform ca...

AI Technology and Medical Applications

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I started reading the Article that Mrs. LaClair gave us. I got down to the article section "Autonomous AI" of the technology article and found the authors argument about AI interesting. For one, the author seemed weary of artificial intelligence which does come on good merit. I found this piece on AI interesting and wanted to know more. I came across this article shorty after titled "The AI that can predict if you're going to die - but no one knows how" (The Telegraph, 12 Nov 2019). This article intrigued me and I decided to read the article. Turns out AI might be the thing we have been missing. According to The Telegraph, an AI system from a US Healthcare center can compile millions of sets of data from patients and can form accurate predictions about the patients lifespan. The algorithm analyzed 1.77 million ECG results from 400,000 patients and predicted with 85% accuracy whether a person would die from health conditions or not (The Telegraph, 12 Nov 2019)....