Next New

We seem to have almost every form of media around us: from virtual reality technology bringing people for collaborative projects across different places and in different time zone, to live social streaming and feeding platform such as Twitter which receive instantaneous update on breaking news, we seem to already achieve every possible means of communication.

It is no doubt that we have achieve great leaps in development for information technology, however, many of these technologies are done through an intermediary: almost all our existing technologies depend on going through a form of middle exchange for us to carry out any form of operation.

What would it be like if we can bypass these middle exchanges, and interact directly with the console or machine? I got this idea based on the movie "Tron Legacy", a great film that talks about the possibility of people getting into a total-submerge experience, and creating a scenario where we really get into the places and experience it for ourselves, instead of the surrounding experience we currently have.

Although, there are films or movies that suggested the possibility of such a technology, we are still far away from an actual, fully-deployable prototype. I'm excited to keep a look-out for such technology.

Wiki So Far

For our class wiki contribution, I have been trying to become familiar with Wiki's layout and its various functions. Editing in Wiki is something new for me and I have learned a new skill in this process. 

In terms of researching the topics, I have been editing the investment portion of Baruch's new media page, and I chose to add ’High Frequency Trading', or HFT in short, as a new topic under that page. This is an important topic because most of today's market activities are done by computer algorithms, instead of human traders, and such change can be interesting and challenging at the same time. 

Few years ago, no one knows what HFT is, or even heard of the term. Publication such as Scott Patterson's-"Dark Pool", or Michael Lewis's- "Flash Boys" allowed the ordinary folks a glimpse into this world and how huge money is made in split seconds. Titled "Dark Pool", it is a narrative about a how a bunch of astrophysicists, or mathematicians, who previously where left in the dusk for being geeky, made extraordinary amount of money in a very short time. 

Because every second, or rather, scale down to nano-second is crucial for HFT, finding ways to reduce the trading time to zero has been compare with a journey of finding the holy grail, for many other market participants. Just to show what these HFT firms can do to cut down a milli-nano second of execution advantage, a Chicago-based HFT firm bought about a few acres of land in the sub-urban just to ensure the smooth relay of signals between Chicago and New York. The benefit associated with buying the land outweighs the costs over the long run, and the company's founder established himself as one of the most accomplished fund manager. 

In my wiki contribution, I will provide an overview of what is HFT, how it works, and some of the notable events and impact of HFT to ordinary investors. 

P2P

File sharing is the process of having access to content of files, documents, images, and other forms of media from one person to another. Before the age of clouding computing, file sharing was limited to physical form and device's storage capacity. With the advancement in distributed technology such as Amazon's web service, Google cloud, and Dropbox, we can instantly upload files to the servers and then sending a sharing link to the others.

Peer-to-Peer sharing is another subset of file sharing, and the number of participants are limited, comparing to file sharing which anyone has access to the file/documents. Bit Torrent and The Pirate Bay are two notable examples of peer-to-peer sharing. In the article of "The Bit Torrent Effect", Bram Cohen, the inventor of Bit Torrent, share his ideas and philosophy of life and work. 

Bit Torrent allows users to do amazing things such as downloading and uploading of large files at speed much faster than usual. The project was initially used to initially used by programmers to swap around software / files for free, however later it was used to download large files such as movies, or event an entire season of shows. Cohen loves to play board games such as 'Amazons' to practice and sharp his thinking, and this skill helped him enormously in terms of solving complex issues and problems. 

Cohen also identified the bottom of Bit Torrent, that the speed to upload and download was very different, and therefore, by breaking up a large file across many users to upload, the process could speed up. Furthermore, Cohen also stated the protocol that encourage users to share their existing resources, and not keeping it for themselves, as the more you share your resources, the faster the download speed you will have too. 

Thompson, C. (2005, January 01). The BitTorrent Effect. Retrieved October 06, 2017, from https://www.wired.com/2005/01/bittorrent-2/

Advice

                    I would recommend Baruch to use more social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat to conduct student engagement. For example, Baruch could create a location-enabled filter, to allow students to use this special filter when they are physically present on the campus. In addition, to design an emoji that mimics our mascot, the bearcat on snapchat.

                   Moreover, Facebook's live option also allows people to do live feed for events and seminars. This is very helpful for those students who have conflict schedules, and by joining in a live feed event, they will not miss out these interesting events. I have used Facebook's live feed feature to listen several events/interviews which I was unable to attend in person, and technologies such as helped many others to join in, without the need of physical presence. Furthermore, live feed option in Facebook also allows its viewers to comment upon the event in real time, and to express out their opinions by giving various icons such as a 'thumbs-up', or a 'sad face'. These tools allow the event organizers to better understand the publics' sentiment. 

                  Such an understanding of the mass audience is important, as event organizers should use a two-way communication that gain insights into their thinking and get feedback about the event. In the traditional media, most communication is one way, one in which a sender sends a message to a person, and then depending on the timing, to get a quick or lengthy response time. New media brings the communication barriers down, and adding more participants into the market, that is, a place for people to exchange their views and ideas. And by understanding their sentiment in real time, event organizers can quickly understand what are the areas needed for improvement. 

Privacy

Thinking that by setting a photo to private would prevent strangers to see your photos? Not the case with Facebook. In today's social media dominated era, every post, pictures, videos, tweets are stored, analyzed, and viewed by some complete strangers. Moreover, the speed for infrastructure development has always exceed our ability to fully comprehend its power, and the pages after pages user-agreement just made understanding of the document unnecessarily complicated. 

Apart from your personal postings on Facebook and Instagram, a google search result is also stored and then sold to companies that have interest in knowing about you. By collecting an extensive record of our search history, search engine companies then sell these data to companies, which allow them to conduct more personalized advertisement. Have you wonder why some of the pages runs the product image of your recent search, for example, Yeezy sneakers? It is because Google records your search, and by using what's so called " associative purchasing analysis", making other sneaker recommendations / websites to you, because of your browsing history shows that you are interested in this product. With these insights, companies can do more personalized pricing, and what that means for consumers could be paying more than the others guy, even though that you both are viewing the same product on two computers, side by side. 

More recently, Equifax's massive data breach of its customers' sensitive information such as Social Security number showed the challenges which many companies are facing. Equifax is a consumer credit reporting agency that holds many other sensitive information for over 800 million individuals. Security breach on such a scale and extent would significantly bring down end users trust in giving out our personal information. 

Creativity and New Media

          I made a video about MTA with the music "wild card". I have never done any video editing before but this has been fun. I think the subway system in New York is wild card as there've been so many delays and accidents that every day commute is like an advanture for us.

          In this video, I used the simplest way of making a video by using a powerpoint presentation and then export out these slides as a video. I have trouble with trying to synchronize the lyrics and timing of the slides.

here is the url to my video:

MTA- the wild card 

Creativity

            User generated content websites such as YouTube and Twitter allow users to contribute and create their unique contents and share their views. Since everyone has different thoughts on the same topic, such websites became gathering platforms for discussing trending topics. In many cases, the topic discussed can quickly becoming a buzzword, and spreadout among many different groups of people.

           Mash-up, the editing and combing pieces from vast different types and forms of media, have proven to be successful in some cases. In the "Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why?", the article talked about how by putting a rapper-style,hip-hop music with Disney's cartoon together can be interesting and good to both Disney and music producers.

           Lyrics in Rap Culture are often explicitly written, and many albums have warning sticker, reminding the listeners of its content. However for cartoon, which caters more towards kids, will have a different theme than that of Rap music. It is interesting to see that the animated characters' doing the signing with their exaggerated singing and facial expression, and the hip hop music playing in the background.

           Because hip hop music and cartoon characters are two very different forms of entertainment, putting these two types of media into one piece nicely proven to be no easy task. To overcome this challenge, music producers would have to source over and think through many aspects, and in this process, that producer would have to create upon his previous knowledge, or will need more information to better improve his work. Such an inflow and outflow of new ideas and thoughts with others encourages communication, and therefore fosters intellectual creativity.

Barnes, B. (2007, September 24). Disney Tolerates a Rap Parody of Its Critters. But Why? Retrieved October 1, 2017, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24crank.html