Advice

To those who are taking CS 1300

GO TO ALL THE CLASSES!!!!! DON'T SKIP. You really do learn a lot and each class builds upon each other so it's important to go to each one, even if it is 8:30 AM. Also have fun and be creative on your projects and if you want to do something unique, ask and Professor Belisle and Brittany will help you.

My Favorite Websites

I really liked Tess Oliver's website. I'm a huge fan of fashion and she had some brands and designers that I really like also such as Anthropologie and Betsey Johnson. I especially liked her hot off the runway page. Luke Tibbits' website is my second favorite page because I love Zombieland. His website is entertaining and well organized. Lastly, I liked Jenna's website. Her artwork is amazing and her site is simple and clean.
Overall I think everyone did a great job on their websites and put a lot of thought into them.

Websites

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~lpham 

Making this website was a challenge and definitely more time consuming than I imagined! I ended up using Expression Web which made a lot of things easier for me. I am most proud of my home page. The picture above is a sample of it. My homepage took me the longest to make but it's the coolest page out of them all. On my homepage I created GIFs so that the pictures would change and be more entertaining. The only change I would make is to my album art page. I would like to have made it into a gallery but I didn't have the time to mess with other programs and software to create it. I suppose the biggest technical challenge for me was getting my pictures to stay. Sometimes they would disappear from my page and I wasn't sure why. The biggest design problem was getting all the pictures to align nicely. I'll be showing this site to all my friends and anyone else I think would like to see it. If any classes or projects call for a website now I know how to make one and will!

Larry Hechlar

On Thursday Mr. Hechlar came in and talked to us about computer software. During his talk I learned many interesting things. An important point that he made was to back up our data. You never know when an accident can happen and you can lose important information on your computer. Another point he made is that no amount of memory is ever enough. The more memory you have the faster your computer is and the more you can do on your computer simultaneously. A place that can provide you with memory at a good price is  www.crucial.com. Just input your computer model and it will find a compatible memory for your computer or laptop. The most interesting thing that I learned is that you should run your battery down on your laptop before recharging it or the battery life will become shorter due to the memory effect. An important tip is to never use cleaners with ammonia, alcohol, or acetone on your computer screens. This will cause your screen to lose the special film on it.

Fake Photos

"The rise of digital photography has made photo fakery much easier"

The picture chosen is known as the "Falling Soldier". This photo was taken by war photographer Robert Capa. It is being debated whether the photo was taken in the location that it claims to be in. The photograph of the soldier could have been falsely placed in another environment for the purpose of creating emotions of some sort. It could be harmful in that it will case people to believe falsely about the story it was used in. My article explores the interesting aspect of recognizing false photographs. Hany Farid is a computer scientist pioneering in the world of digital forensics. He has created a program that works to recognize if a photo has been altered or not. Farid's program detects the disturbances that are made in the photograph's pixels. Farid's program is continuing to find ways to detect forgeries within a photograph, the program can currently detect 10 signs of false photography. His skill and program are already in great demand, he has already helped people find the truth in their photos. For example, with this photo he could help determine whether this image was taken in the place that it claims to be. Another example of this is a scientist who came to Farid with photos of findings taken from his laboratory. He was afraid that a member of the lab team may have altered them. It turns out that the photos were authentic.  I think that this is a great development but it will also mean that tools used to alter photos will also grow to become more complex and harder to detect. Though that may happen, starting now this program could help many people in proving their photos true or false.

Wickelgren, Ingrid. "TRUE LIES. (Cover story)." Current Science 92.4 (2006): 10-12. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.

Underwater Fashion Photograpgy

My PowerPoint presentation was about underwater fashion photography. I chose this topic because I am interested in photography and I love fashion. The photos of Alix Malka's underwater Japanese fashion shoot in particular caught my eye. The use of shape and movement in the photographs to call attention upon the clothing was fantastic. The photos were a lot of fun to stack but I misjudged the timing on it. If I could change anything that would be the only thing. I discovered that underwater photography has gained popularity lately and that Alix Malka is quite popular in his field. His other works are also quite interesting, I like his style.

I found Hannah's PowerPoint on the Stanford Prison experiment to be very interesting and it caught my full attention throughout. I have always found psychology to be a fascinating topic. I also enjoyed Luke's presentation because he managed to turn a topic that I have never really been interested into something really entertaining and attention catching.

Chris Nolan

On Thursday, Chris Nolan came and gave us a talk about useful search techniques in order to find high-quality information. I learned a lot about Google that I was not aware of. For example, I learned how to use Google's advanced search and that was definitely a huge help for my future searches because now I know how to refine my searches by country, language and domain name. Another aspect of Google that I learned more about is Google scholar that allows you to search for better quality resources that can be used in your research. A particularly interesting point was that Google is connected to our library server so that whenever we use Google scholar we can view the full article if our online library sources carries it. I also learned that Google continuously updates their search engine techniques in order to give the users a better search experience. They base the refinement of their search engine on how many links a certain website has within other sites, but they have developed their counting system in such a way that it will not be tricked by sites created to give boosts to certain websites. I learned a lot of little search tips such as adding a plus or minus sign to search for certain words or not to include certain words. When searching for better quality information it is a good idea to look at the domain name. In the search bar adding the phrase 'site:(domain)' will allow you to directly refine your search as opposed to going to the advanced search section. Now I have a bunch of great tips for finding better research material!