This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on September 21, 2009.
What’s the home page of your browser? Whatever it is, that window is a subtle window to your accumulated interests or your way to get the news and, by a long shot, maybe even your appreciation for a faster load time.
This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 28, 2009.
Imagine: It’s 2059. You’re in the Guiyu of Guangdong Province, China, strolling the streets. The air is crisp and the grass green. The cafe-lined streets are littered with people chatting and typing away on their laptops.
Actually, at this rate, the only thing Guiyu will be littered with is electronic waste, or e-waste, an umbrella term for discarded electronic devices.
Instead of the idyllic image of Guiyu above, the town is the main center of exported e-waste, in China.
This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 3, 2009.
I’ve always wanted to be a meteorologist.
The forecast? Cloudy. Well, the technological forecast, anyway. The next big Internet innovation is cloud computing.
In this case, the “cloud” represents the intricacies of all of the interconnected computers on the Internet. Cloud computing is a way to store your data on the Internet and make it accessible anywhere, through any computer.
This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on March 16, 2009.
In the spirit of the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday last Friday, I’d like to celebrate my favorite thing on the Web right now: Twitter.
On the surface, it is deceptively simple. It’s a social network and a micro-blogging tool in which you exchange 140-character updates with your “followers.” These blurbs are publicly visible by default, but can be restricted to just your friends.
This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on February 2, 2009.
The information highway just got a little more crowded. There are now more than 1 billion people on the Internet, according to comScore, an Internet research firm. The Internet’s democratization of information has made a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge easily accessible. However, this also has its pitfalls.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, wrote, “The notion that the world’s knowledge is literally at your fingertips is very compelling and is very beguiling.”
The question remains: Is the Internet making us stupid?
My name is Millie — I enjoy traveling, low maintenance plants, hiking, reading and running. And, sometimes I write. If the computer is a bicycle for the mind, I can ride pretty fast. More?