Living in an (un)moral Society

Morals are often taught to us as we go through school. Yet somehow, the morals of society continue to disintegrate. People lie, steal, and take advantage of each other. As humans, we often get distracted by goals in our lives. While we once might be good people, we slowly distance ourselves from our own morals as small goals contradict them. One exception is followed by hundreds. If we want to maintain our sense of morality, we need each to set up ways to keep ourselves in check with our own personal standards.

Overcoming Digital Addiction

Studies show that the best way to overcome addiction is to replace your habit with some other activity. For example, running every-time you want to smoke. Our brain intentionally sends signals when our bodies need something. Like how we get hungry when we need food. When our brain tells us to partake in our addiction, we can instead do something else. This in turn re-trains our brain over time, eventually eliminating the addiction. Many of us have become addicted to digital activities. The best way to overcome the addiction is to find a suitable activity that will replace our need to consume digital media. For me, it helps to consider what need my addiction is fulfilling and find something in the same category, e.g., social acceptance.

Computer Science should be a core subject

Enjoy the video.

For more information on bringing computer science to schools, please visit code.org
If you would like to learn how to program, here is a great, completely free site. codecademy.com

Released from the Shackles: Media's voice

It was once stated that media controlled the people. The professionals of media would find news to report on. They would report on events they decided, and support the side they believed in. The only way society was able to hear the news, was through this medium, and as such, the media could control the news. With controlled news comes controlled society. It was hard for others to learn anything about the news outside what the media said. Those days are over.

While news is still important and widespread, people reporting the news are no longer professionals. Anyone in the world can share their own voice, and report their own events. Clay Shirky calls this event "Mass Amateurization" in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He states that amateurs now control "the media" and it threatens the old-fashion-news industry. In my opinion, this is a very good thing. Now people can seek out the opinion and events they choose. As a people we are no longer controlled, but asked to think for ourselves. By creating a more transparent world, we understand each-other better and make things right. We are now allowed to make our own conclusions and have the power to act on our decisions.

The male nurse vs the female engineer

Computer science programs, and other engineering type programs, have struggled catering to women. These programs have always been predominantly filled with males. This will always be the case. While it is noble to convince women to join these programs, nature claims it will never happen. As people have studied gender differences, one thing they have learned is that men have a greater capacity for logic and women have a greater capacity for emotion. Women have an inherit nature to choose more emotional and caring career paths, where men gravitate towards more logical and systematic paths. Just as engineering programs lack in females, programs such as nursing and elementary education  lack in males. Engineering and nursing will always be gender skewed, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The Foreseeable Future

Imagine a fully automated McDonalds. You drive up, hit a couple buttons for your order, and your food gets put together by machines. A McDonalds without employees. This could be in our forseeable future. Already, software and technology has started to replace many jobs. Google is even building a fully automated car. Hop in, select your destination, and enjoy the ride. When these cars become popular, we can say goodbye to taxi drivers and chauffeurs. One could argue that technology is destroying jobs. I would argue that technology is simply recycling jobs. Look at the technology job market and you will realize there are thousands of jobs that go unfilled. When agricultural advances came, such as tractors and sprinkler systems, many farm hands found themselves jobless. Most of the population used to work on a farm. As a civilization, we changed, and created more jobs. We can do the same thing. I'm excited to see what new markets and industries come to existence in our future.

The Creativity Pot

Have you ever been in a room pitching your ideas to others, only to have them push better ideas back at you? It is the most incredible feeling in the world. You can come up with some great idea, that no one else can think of. As you tell others about your idea, they tell you ways to change or expand your idea to create something better; something you never thought of. Together in this melting pot of ideas, ideas are tuned into amazing products. Creativity comes from numbers. One person may be creative, but together we can change the world. If we look though history, we can find that the biggest advances happened in times and governments when thinking outside of the box was encouraged. Aristotle built ideas off of Plato, who in turn built off of Socrates. Ideas flourish upon collaboration. One modern evidence of this is the Android OS for mobile phones. Android is an open-source software, where its competitors are not. Android started off as the most lacking, most annoying phone OS out there. To be frank, it was horrible and its competition was incredible. However, through time, Android has become the most popular and most up to date phone OS on the market. Its competitors simply can't keep up with the innovation. The open-source software allows creative ideas to build off of others creative ideas, creating a collage of human creativity. When we work and share our ideas with each-other, truly amazing things can happen.