Month: April 2017

This week I watched my classmates present drafts of their posters and also presented a draft poster with my group. Since being in college, I actually haven’t presented a poster in a course. Usually classes require a slideshow or movie. I have made and presented a few research posters, but they are very different than the ones we are presenting in this IP course. Compared to the research posters I have worked on, this poser had much less texts, more pictures, no graphs, and no sections like “methods”, “data”, or “results”. I liked working on the presentation of the poster. I think it was hard to find a balance of not putting too many words on the poster and making it look like we spent more than 5 minutes on it.

My group presented self driving cars and how they relate to work, ethical dilemmas, and memory. I think our presentation was a good first run through, but there was a lot for us to improve on. For one, we needed to look at stats of the current self-driving cars.

On Thursday we spent the last part of class talking about the Buried Giant. The main thing we focused on was how the author addresses to the readers. He uses words like “you” to make the reader feel included and part of the conversation.

This week, we saw many groups’ presentations, and all of them were very insightful in how today’s world functions and the problems that arise surrounding technology, politics and the environment. The two presentations that stood out to me were the presentations about Amazon and online privacy and about the possible need to relocate to Mars. Both issues differ on the probable size of the issue, one being about our internet privacy and the other being about the literal future of our entire race. An interesting concept that was brought up about the relocation presentation was the question of who gets to go to Mars? Would it be like applying to be a sperm donor, where those that were the most healthy, fit, etc. be selected? Or would applications be open to the general public? It raises many moral and ethical problems surrounding the presentation, and definitely may become reality in the near future as resources begin to be consumed at a frantic pace. The presentation about online shopping and internet privacy was very interesting because of the relevance it has to today’s world surrounding technology. People have conspiracies of governments being able to tap into laptop and cellphone cameras, monitoring our every move as if we were living in 1984 (the book, not the year of course). It also asks the question, can we trust corporations as the pace of technology increases exponentially each year? Will we have to resort to taking our electronic privacy into our own hands? Is it even a possibility?

One thing I found particularly interesting this week was seeing how people developed the things we learned in class to make the posters. It was particularly interesting seeing that no two groups did the same thing, and although two groups had the same topic their approaches were so completely different that there was practically no overlap at all. It was also very cool to see how greatly people’s other classes influenced the topics of their posters.

In addition to the posters we saw this week, I thought our short discussion of the book was interesting. Talking about the narration and what the style itself tells us was something fascinating to me since I had never thought of what the narration tells beyond the story itself.

This week in class I thought it was very interesting learning about the different presentations and the implications for which they discussed. One of the most interesting ones, personally, was the possibility of creating a habitable human existence on Mars. The colonization of mars would be one of necessity. The group talked about how the treatment and over capacity that earth is reaching-8 billion people by 2050- will create a precarious situation. As a result, an alternative they suggested is mars. Although exotic, they presented quality arguments that showed the ability for such an endeavor to happen. These include already existant life necessities such as water, an atmosphere, and mild temperatures.

There are already private corporations that are exploring the ability for space travel to become more common. Both Space X and Virgin Mobile are helping to enable the public to experience Space. These types of innovations serve as a catalyst for furthered space exploration and travel. In the future, it may be necessary for these corporation to aid in both their technical ability and influence to relieve some of earth’s  planetary strains and allow for an increased capacity of human kind.

While their proposal isn’t one hundred percent practical, they presented a logical argument. In their proposal they supposed that the use of a secondary planet is not necessarily in immediate relocation, but in long term growth. The initial people that inhabit Mars would then go on to reproduce and ease the future burden of those citizens on earth.

Our project focuses on the relation between science fiction writing and science itself. Humanity has always been inventing ways to make life easier, from the wheel to spaceships. But its hard to come up with ideas of things that will benefit humanity. I know personally I try to think of inventions to better society everyday (mainly to get rich but thats beside the point) and I still haven’t come up with a good one. Its so hard to come up with world altering ideas that it makes you wonder how people ever come up with them in the first place. A trend my group is starting to see is that usually someone writes about a world changing idea in science fiction and then years later it turns into a reality. When you think about it this makes a lot of sense. Science Fiction writers write stories of futuristic societies with new inventions no ones though of, and they are able to do this because they don’t care if its realistic or not. Thats what makes it Science Fiction. However, when people read those stories they think it’s really cool and they use those stories as goals for the future. In 2012, the show Black Mirror, came out. This Science Fiction series has already seen some of its ideas turn to realities as well as we saw in one groups presentation this week. Im very interested to look into this idea further.