Please write a reflection on the course, what you have learned, what you have enjoyed (or not!).  It helps me reflect on how the course has gone and how I can improve it for the next group of students.

Personally I find abstract thinking and discussing/debating controversial topics fascinating. Some people become emotionally attached to their argument for moral or ethical reasons but I find the most productive discussions are had from two individuals that can step aside from that aspect and purely discuss the topic. This is why I found Lars to be very intuitive with his thought process and could see that he was coming from a neutral perspective, enabling me to speak my mind without judgment.

I feel as though If I had of said something highly unethical or immoral the discussion would be about my reasons why or why not and the view of the other side would be presented also, not an atonement for the point of view I had placed.

My views on religion and ethical/moral stance was freely expressed without judgement, which is often shunned from others for being a “no go topic” to save people from becoming “highly offended”. This is where productive discussions come from and I found that this class was open to all views and ideas.

I enjoy hearing a statement and then questioning that statement from a neutral perspective. I felt I could do that in this class as I knew the discussion would be productive and no one would be attacked on there view. A lot of the time I withhold my view point as the person receiving the information is not capable of responding without attack or pointless negative defense.

Overall I enjoyed the class and the way we questioned existence itself among other interesting topics that I found Lars to be genuinely interested in discussing and actually LISTENING to your reply without interrupting. The way it should be :). Thank you

Find at least 3 different sources of evidence (e.g. a blog post, a journal article, youtube video etc.) for each of the two topics listed below (6 in total). You don’t need to read or watch them.

Try to find as many different kinds of sources of evidence as you can but try to find at least two sources which you think might be ‘academic papers/articles.

Topics:

Computational Thinking
Virtualisation Technology
Write a blog post and for each source you find:

1

post the URL, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbnTZCj0ugI
the search terms you used, “Computational Thinking”
how you found it (e.g. Google search or followed link from wikipedia) Straight into Youtube search
who wrote/created it ” Paxton/Patterson “
when it was written/created/recorded/published ” 8 May 2018 ”
what kind of ‘publication’ it is (e.g. news item, youtube video, white paper) Youtube video explainer video
how ‘credible (believable)’ you think it is – include your reasons “Being at the top of the search results and by viewing the amount of likes the video has pointed me to believe the community approves”

2

post the URL, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297603485_Research_on_the_Virtualization_Technology_in_Cloud_Computing_Environment
the search terms you used, “Virtualisation technology paper”
how you found it (e.g. Google search or followed link from wikipedia) Straight into Google search
who wrote/created it ” Wei Min Ding ,Benjamin Ghansah, Yan Yan Wu “December 2015 ”
what kind of ‘publication’ it is (e.g. news item, youtube video, white paper) Academic Paper
how ‘credible (believable)’ you think it is – include your reasons “Judging from the amount of reads and the listing in the top search results from google it seems to be a popular paper. The structure and writing is intellectual and seems to be backed by legitimate sources of information”

3

Click to access Wing06-ct.pdf

the search terms you used, “Virtualisation technology paper” In google “Computational Thinking Paper”

Jeannette M. Wing

Academic Paper

how ‘credible (believable)’ you think it is – include your reasons

Without analysing the paper I can assume from its google rankings that the paper holds weight. It is rather short in 4-5 pages but seems to be structured well.

What interests me about IT and what doesn’t.
(a ‘warming you up to the real stuff’ exercise!)

This is intended to be fun but to get you thinking about yourself!

Finish these sentences in no more than 10 words.

The IT area/subject I have most enjoyed is ….

Programming for the web with new technologies

The IT area/subject I least enjoyed is…..

Social Media is defiantly the least interesting as for me its all knowledge I already have. Others may find it useful though and I can see why.

The IT area/subject I was most interested in is……

Programming and creating new software

The one IT thing I never want to have to do again is…………..

Social Media as I dont need to cover information I already know.

I chose to study IT because I …….

Im a logical thinker and most of computational work is based on “if X = this, do that”.

If I couldn’t study IT I would study………..

Astrology or physics, as the world is a fascinating place which I am passionate in understanding.

When I was a kid I wanted to be………………..

An All Black or Basketball player

One IT thing I would like to know more about is ……..

Quantum Physics and how to use my new telescope better.

Decide whose blog is most useful to other students – search through the other student blogs, find the one that you think is the most useful to you and write why you think it is useful in your own blog.

I found this to be a very interesting insight into a person mind state. When Aline answered the ethical questions in this exercise, I could see how her mind reacts differently to different situations.

In her last answer to “You are doing an initial research in area of a town where may bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. your research is independent from the police, because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour.” I found that see had a very reserved outlook on the rights of others privacy. As it is a common area in public the law states you are alowed to film and observe anyone unless they are in the privacy of there own home or a step of harrasment is taken where the observee is being violated. (waiting outside their home to continue viewing them in “public”)

Overall these types of posts are the most interesting and gives a useful insight into a persons beliefs and moral radar

Some situations are presented and we have to say if they are ethical or not, and why.

You find some good images on the web that would look good on your site.  You copy and paste them to your blog:

Look on the website for any creative commons tags, If the images have not been declared as free use then you are probably in violation of laws

You are in a hurry to finish an assignment and you find the perfect explanation of a difficult concept on Wikipedia. You decide to copy it into your work.

If the work has been referenced then a direct reference to the author is required. Otherwise a reference to the Wikipedia page is required in preferably an APA style link

You are a medical researcher and you think you have discovered a new drug that cures lung cancer.  It worked well on mice although a few of them died of heart problems. You want to test it on people.  You recruit 100 lung cancer patients into your treatment programme. You don’t tell them about the new drug.  You treat 50 patients with usual drugs and 50 with the new drug to see which is better.

The ethical thing to do and is most likely a legal requirement would be to fully inform the patients of the possible problems and risks that are likely to occur based on previous results

You are doing your PhD about drug abuse among students.  You interview 30 students about their drug use. You discover that one of the students is actually a fairly big-time dealer and you report him to the police.

This is an ethical issue and based on perspective of what is and isn’t OK. Just because the government has declared something illegal and dangerous does not necessarily mean it is. Some advocates of medicinal cannabis are labeled drug dealers and criminals, yet the people they help are suffering from schizophrenia and Parkinson disease. Is it unethical to deny these suffering patients the help they need because the government says no?

You are a researcher looking at the effect of violent computer games on children.  You recruit 20 children into your study. Over a month you regularly show them images of violence to see if it has an adverse effect on their behaviour.  One of the children becomes quite distressed each time and so you stop showing her images and drop her from the study.

The greater good can be an influence in any question like this. Is the results that come out from the study worth more lives than the immediate effect on a single life? In any case I would argue a single life is the primary focus and should be morally restricting to not impact a child permanently with psychological issues.

You want to research how easy it is to hack into your organisation’s computer system by persuading people to divulge login and password details.  You recruit a small team to ring up key people in the organisation and persuade them to give either their own or their boss’s details.

If the information is only used to highlight the issues with the company or organisation It could be argued that the benefit is worth the immediate deceit. This will not hold up in a court of law though “I did it to show them they are vulnerable”. Unless you are being paid to do this, dont. Its not worth the backlash.

You are doing an initial research in area of a town where may bars and pubs are located, to estimate the level of problematic social behaviour in the area. your research is independent from the police, because you want to observe their behaviour as well. You observe both abusive and violent behaviour.

I have no problem with this as long as they are abiding by the law. Public areas are open to any sort of video and recording of incidents, just like how the media and reporters work. If the observer is not peaking in private windows or trespassing then its open game.

When I write an article online I gather information from many resources, websites and social media. This is completely legal and unless you are directly stealing information like a word for word article that has been published, your most likely in the clear.

This form of information gathering is generally under the free use guidelines which I think is great! Enabling the world to share information in this manner is essential for learning and the free information of the internet has sped the worlds ability to learn incredibly. But are we allowed to directly take a news article and post it on our website? Depends. Information is protected by the Creative Commons licenses which display the author’s wishes when posting information publically. Most likely the data you have stolen word for word has a protection clause attached to it in the form of an image like this 

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This license system has 6 different types which all have different permissions attached to them. Yes, this doesn’t stop someone from doing it, and most of the time the information you have made freely available is not worth enforcing the laws against directly stealing it, but it is a nice fall back in case the information creates large amounts of wealth further down the track that you did not foresee.

Abiding by these requests inside the content you are using is the best practice. But if you do steal the next Harry Potter novel that is written online before being made famous, be sure to see a lawyer knocking on your door in the future.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Olegs area of interest is based around the internet of things subject. Some of his highlight interests is connecting non conforming devices to the IOT infrastructure.

I think this is a great research topic as the field is bleeding edge and interesting in the technology landscape. Creating interesting in a topic is easy where no one has explorered epecially with Olegs interest in the side of connectivity that would have not been thought of before. This is like connecting a Toaster to the internet. Why? Because you can is normally a good enough reason, and pushing the norms is a fun way of finding new use cases that originally werent expected.

Three things you don’t know about it

• Hardware implementation (integrated circuits)
• Low level protocols of data exchange
• Update distribution

The above is a insightful restriction I would have overlooked at first but understand why he has highlighted this point. Does a toaster have a wifi card? Why would it? and if it doesnt does that mean it is not applicapble for the project or can this be modified to work with the enviroment being developed.

(The toaster example is just an outside the box idea of the possiblities and restrictions)

Oleg has refined his choice to focus on the firmware and software aspect of the development process researching how to provide an service that keeps devices updated and connected to the development enviroment in a streamlined way.

Overall I think he has refined is decision well and am interested to see what he comes up with as he is quite the competent developer.

ERC20 smart contracts with Ethereum

This topic is specifically aimed at my website imgopq.com which is designed to share images from the opacity.io storage platform. The idea is to create a fee market based around promoting images to be viewable at the top of each category of images. The promoted images will be designated 1st,2nd 3,4 and 5th place in terms of which promoted image has received the highest payment in crypto-currency. The images timeout after a set period of time and are removed from the promotion section. If the user wishes to keep their image in the promoted section they must make another payment atleast higher than the 5th placed image. If another person promotes their image afterwards the image in 5th place will slip out of the promoted section and be replaced by the higher payment image. This also applies to any image in the promoted section where if the 1st placed image is overtaken the proceeding placed images all shift down a placement and the 5th placed image slips of the end of the promoted images section.

This idea can be accomplished with an ERC-20 Ethereum smart contract. The contract will accept a promoted handle from the image being shared and a payment amount. This contract will store a list of the current 5 highest paid images and the website will access this list to display the images. The contract will also have a timeout period for each promoted image to remove the image from the list if a week has passed.

Community disadvantage, inequalities in adolescent subjective well-being, and local social relations: The role of positive and negative social interactions (2019, James Laurence)

1. Did the abstract tell you the three things I said it should? If not, what did it tell you? Yes, The paper abstract identifies what the paper is about (social well-being in adolescents) and the path that the paper takes in researching the topic of negative impacts of social interactions. They then provide some insight into the results of this research and how this applies to the original questions.
2. What seems to be the research question(s) they were trying to answer ? How does the interaction of youths between 16-17 years in social environments being negative or positive effect the development of that individual.
3. What  methods did they use to answer the question(s)? Polls and research based around the topic and surveys to the target audience of the research paper.
4. How credible do you think the paper is? The paper has a valid frame of references and seems to follow a logical path of evidence vs conclusions. The author has published this paper on a well known academic paper website where the papers are vetted by peer review. Also after researching the Author the origin is related to a large university in the United States with a credible background.
5. Did you agree, or not, with what they wrote in their conclusion? Why? Yes the paper comes to a point about the direct relationship with the community and social economic status of that community that directly effects the interactions that the target study group experience. As the evidence backs up the results with throughout investigation I agree with the paper. Also seeing the impact of these social interactions from both economic environments I can agree with real world experience.
6. Briefly describe two things that you learnt from the paper.  The results show me how the direct link between the economic environment effects the youths outcome and also how this effect being negative or positive trickles down the tree of social interactions with outside people.
7. In no more than 250 of your own words (i.e. a paraphrase), describe what the paper is about. This paper is about the social and economic standpoint of individuals between the age of 16-17 years old and how their environment effects the social interactions they have within their community. The paper shows a direct link between the economic stand point of their community and how this translates into either positive or negative interactions with their peers. As this negative or positive interaction generally is derived from this source, it is carried over into external environments like school or general socialization outside of this confined environment. The paper also explores through polling and surveys different results from a range of communities and how they differ depending on the background that they originate. Positive reinforcement is directly linked to a higher economic community where as a negative is predominate from the lower economic origin.

References

Laurence, J. (2019). Community disadvantage, inequalities in adolescent subjective well-being, and local social relations: The role of positive and negative social interactions. Social Science & Medicine, [online] 237, p.112442. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/40045514/Community_disadvantage_inequalities_in_adolescent_subjective_well-being_and_local_social_relations_The_role_of_positive_and_negative_social_interactions [Accessed 10 Sep. 2019].

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What is ontology?

Ontology is the study and thought concepts based around what is real, truth or an illusion. The human race has had an incremental rise in the understanding and explanation of the world around them to an ever increasing degree of certainty and scope through science. This was the end game of an evolutionary process over thousands of years through research and experimentation. Religion has held back this process through a manipulative control mechanism that tends to lean peoples thought process into a “head in the sand” scenario where its just that way because (insert god) designed it that way. This of course was dominant in the early years of civilizations natural mind state where knowledge had not progressed past “the sun rises because we sacrificed a goat yesterday to the gods” in a meaningful way yet. Through that long process (that I will not detail here) we have gone from cavemen making fire, through to the internet and instant communications with a process that has developed to the point where information is not just believed, but vetted by the greater hive mind to be of an legitimate source with proof and process of claims. The power of information being freely available in this way in the past 30 years has skyrocketed the ability to quickly and efficiently find truth from the reality around us.

This how ever does not account for the concepts that cannot be explained or the answer is likely to never be solved because of the nature of the question moving into questioning existence itself. These are the fascinating questions that drive modern science through research. The two slit experiment is a perfect example of a question that cannot be answered… currently, but questions reality itself in its outcomes. Just the literal process of observing a particle in transit changes the outcome of how the particle reacts in the future AND the past! This is seen through the way the particle reacts as a wave or individual particle. How can the past be affected by the future? or is this an illusion! and we are yet to understand a hidden secret about the fundamental laws of nature?

How is it relevant to research?

The ideas above are the fundamental ways in which we discover new and interesting technologies. This advances our knowledge to improve mostly our comfort and ability to control and decipher our reality and at its core gain wealth and knowledge to reproduce optimally with a brutal vetting process!… :D. To have this base knowledge in the process of learning and vetting information in a verified way gives us better results and increases the efficiency and quality of the ideas we create and problems we solve. Understanding previous mistakes or discoveries and changing the process to get better results is at its core how the human mind works and relates to all fields.

What is the connection between ontology and epistemology in a research context?

Ontology and epistemology are so closely related as they overlap in many ways. Epistemology is the study of knowledge where as ontology is the study of existence and meaning. Through knowledge you understand more about the unanswerable questions which drive the question to be divided up into smaller solvable sections. And whether that understanding is wrong or not is irrelevant, as the process loops continuously refining the results till a more accurate outcome is acquired. Do you exist? Is freewill an illusion?