This may come as a surprise (or not) but one of my favorite movies is Transformers. I use to watch the cartoon all the time when I was little. Here’s brief run through about the movie for those who don’t know. The story revolves around this kid named Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf) who seems kind of like an outcast until he gets this car that keeps acting up. One night the car takes off in the middle off the night. Thinking his car was stolen he chases after it. Finally finding a cop car he tries to get its attention not knowing that the cop car is actually an enemy robot or a Decepticon. The cop car gives chase and Sam takes off running.  His car that was “stolen” comes to his rescue as BumbleBee, an Autobot. This sets off a series of events for Sam for he’s unknowingly mankind’s last chance for survival. He holds the key to an alien power cube that could destroy the earth if the Decepticons get a hold of it. Throughout the movie other alien robots are introduced both good and evil.

The Production Company, DreamWorks SKG did so well in creating these gigantic robots that you couldn’t help but believe they were real. In the back of your mind though you know they aren’t. When you think about the making of the movie you can’t help but applaud the actors for their job well done. These robots aren’t really in the shot so to see them interact with each other on film is truly amazing. When I was little I use to watch Power Rangers, which had robots too. It’s amazing to see how far technology has come since then because the Power Rangers robots looked like toys and very fake.

There was a scene where a scorpion robot bursts out of the sand and attacks military soldiers. The effect was achieved by detonating a primer cord under the sand. Unfortunately this was really dangerous because the explosions had to be close to the actors in the scene. Before the scene was shot the director, Michael Bay, told the actors to run and keep running no matter what or else they could be hurt or even killed. The actors expressions of panic in this shot were 100% genuine. They used a lot of explosive equipment in this film and it made for amazing action.

I’ve taken a video editing and motion graphics course so some of this information isn’t new to me. The RenderMan Software was pretty cool though. I’ve heard of it but I never knew that it was used on all these well-known movies.

The morphing software was amazing. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used this in creating Transformers.

It was cool to see that Industrial Lighting and Design helped create Transformers and another one of my favorites Pirates of the Caribbean. They won a lot of awards for their movies and they are well deserved!

An urban legend is a story with an obscure origin and little or no supporting evidence. They spread and grow into various forms.

The false statement saying that mobile homes are named because they can be moved from place to place is one that I thought was true. It makes sense but that’s not why they’re called mobile homes. 

I’ve also thought that Coca-cola containing cocaine was a joke too but it’s not, it’s true.

The freakish fatalities page says that a doctor was decapitated by an elevator. I never knew that could actually happen. I’ve been scared to catch my hand in the door trying to open it real fast for another person but how would someone’s head get stuck? Traumatizing for the person who witnessed the whole thing. Reminds me of that movie Final Destination 2. Nightmares thanks!!

Yea there were a few that I thought were true for the longest time like chewing gum taking seven years to pass through the digestive system. I still hear that one going around. 

People will believe anything these days. Remember the saying don’t believe in everything you see on TV? Well it’s the same for the Internet. There’s nothing stopping anyone from writing whatever they want. 

I’ve never heard of IANA until now. That IANA organizes global coordination is huge. I knew about some of these roots but I didn’t know what most of them were or meant. I knew .com, .edu, .gov, .net, .org… and I think that’s it. I’ve never really thought about it. Makes sense now.   I couldn’t believe how many there were. One for every country pretty much. The only one I’ve seen was .uk and I can’t even remember where. I’ve never seen over half of them so it was interesting to find out they existed.

I didn’t have a problem finding brandiembrey.com available. I even tried my nickname, Blynn.com. That was taken but not b-lynn.com. I really want to go into photography and embreyimages.com is available which is nice. The word photography seemed too long to use.  Be-images.com is also available. 

Topic Description

I absolutely love cooking and I love seafood. This was just a random thing that just popped in my mind (probably because I’m hungry while I’m typing this). I remember this one time that my mom tried to cook crab… tried is the key word. Love her to death… hate her crab. I know how to cook it but not how to make it taste edible. Ha. I just need to know what to cook it in and the spices to add and all that good stuff.

Available Tutorials

I found a lot of cooking information as well as preparation information. Usually I would get the crab from the grocery store and it would already be dead but I’ve been crabbing before and it’s a ton more fun if you have fresh live crab.

I thought this site was interesting because it tells you how to make sure the crab suffers less when you’re killing it.

http://www.martins-seafresh.co.uk/Crabs.htm

Then it goes on to say how to cook it and get the meat out. It doesn’t say anything about what spices to add and I found that if you don’t add anything else then the crab is bland. This site also has links to cooking lobster, mussels and oysters. Mmm.

http://www.helpwithcooking.com/seafood-shellfish/how-to-cook-crab.html

This site has cooking information for both live and frozen crab. It also gives you ideas about what to put in with the crab to make it tastier. There are also a ton more cooking recipes on this site.

http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/cooking-crabs.htm

This site gives you different recipes that include crab in them.  It also gives you advice on how to purchase a good, fresh crab.

Evaluation

I chose this site, http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/cooking-crabs.htm , because the directions sound very easy and I like how they show the different things you can put crab in. I can’t wait to try it; I just have to find a kitchen to do so. I don’t really trust the burners in the dorm kitchen but I’ll probably go to Teri’s apartment and cook over there. I learned a lot about how to prepare a live crab and I’m excited to cook something so fresh.

Using online tutorials

 I have looked up recipes online a bunch of times but that’s about it. I’ve never searched for a tutorial for something else. 

First this is my JPEG:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2236087/butterfly 

then here’s my word document.. it’s on the History of the Olympic Rings if anyone is interested:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2236104/olympic-rings  

Ok what I think about Scribd. The upload time.. it went so fast I was amazed. One thing worried me though, which im sure everyone else figured out too, is the plagerism that I know is going to happen cause of this site. I just uploaded one of my essays to a site so that now everyone can see it. Other than that there really is a whole lot of things to see on this site. I agree about the “YouTube of documents” saying. The simplicity in uploading and finding other information is fantastic. 

The Cyber Journalist

Journalism is the gathering, writing and reporting of information. Cyber journalism just refers to the media that the journalist uses, the Internet. Cyber journalism is growing because of the speed in which information is getting to its readers. Though the same information can be found in print, most companies enjoy the endless possibilities of the Internet. Videos, podcasts, slideshows and blogs can now be shown and readers can actually comment on them letting their voice be heard to whoever wants to listen. Unfortunately most blogs are opinion based and so many people debate on whether it is really journalism.

Four computers are commissioned by the U. S. government to start an experimental network called ARPANET. The first tests are run in September 1969 at UCLA. In October of that year a second computer is connected in Stanford. UC Santa Barbara is added in November and the University of Utah joins in December.  ARPANET evolves during the 1970s into a network called the Internet.  During the 1970s to 1980s, the British Broadcasting Corporation developed videotex, which included communications services. Unfortunately it was an unsuccessful new media and online journalism format. Even though it failed, it laid the groundwork for new media in the 1990s.  The CompuServe computer time-sharing device is developed around this time and played an important role in cyber journalism development. InfoBank, created by The New York Times grows in the 1970s and is a newspaper database service.

Alohanet, a packet radio network system, was the first wireless computer networking system in the 1970s and was developed by Norm Abramson at the University of Hawaii.  Around the same time, IBM announces its new computers that support time-sharing and online computing. The first use of a computer terminal for journalism was in November 8^th, 1970. It was a news copy that was sent from Columbia, Couth Carolina to a computer in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1971 Intel’s 4004 microprocessor comes around and smaller, more powerful computers are being made. ARPANET then connects to 23 network computers and Ray Tomlinson sends one of the first e-mail messages. His new program uses the “@” symbol to separate the user’s login name to the host computer’s name. E-mail quickly becomes popular. Companies change from mechanical to computer production systems in 1971 and become the first major step in new media and online journalism. The first newspaper for go online was The Columbus Dispatch on July 1, 1980.  In 1990 the World Wide Web (WWW) prototype is created at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the original WWW program that brings together networked information and hypertext.

There is a problem with cyber journalism though. Anyone can do it. People are very computer savvy and it does not take very much to write about something online. This promotes the problem of authenticity. Since anyone can write stories or news online, who’s to say if the information is valid? This is why blogging is a debatable form of online journalism. You get biased opinions of people who may not even fully know what they are reporting about. If you want valid information make sure there are other links on the page what lead you to more information on the topic. Incorrect sites are not going to give you links if there is a possibility of being proved wrong.

There are different forms of blogs available to subscribers. Text blogs are text only journals. Video blogs are for people who videotape their information. This website is a report on a video journalists career. http://viewmag.blogspot.com/2007/03/video-journalist-decree.html

This form of blogging seems more factual because the blog readers/watchers can see the results rather than relying on the bloggers words. Podcasts are like text blogs in the way the subscribers have to rely on the bloggers words. Podcasts are MP3 audio recordings that can automatically download to a user’s computer as soon as they are published online.

Most sites that have audio, video and text reports are full of information found on television or in the newspaper such as www.CNN.com and http://www.nytimes.com/ . Both of these websites hold valid information and their readers know it. Their reputation is set so there are no worries about false facts. YouTube, www.youtube.com, is a website that people need to be careful of. Yes they have some factual information, but it is pretty easy to make fabricated information look real. Sites like www.ABC.com and www.NBC.com show a different form of journalism. While CNN and the New York Times gives out news, ABC and NBC mostly give out information on television shows. This is still a form of online journalism also. They are giving out information on a subject.  They both have links to news reports within their original site.

People who do not have access to computers are at a disadvantage to people who do. The non-computer people can still find information but they will not find it at the rate the computer people do. Newspapers and library cards are a cheap but slow source compared to the Internet. 

 Different forms of regulations are used to control the media. Everyone is entitled to free speech media included. They are allowed to publish whatever stories whenever they want. However the public also has the right to privacy, which is the opposite of the medias’ free speech. The public has the right for the media to not publish certain stories. Therefore, journalism regulations restrict what the media says in order to protect individuals or groups. Some of the regulations are obvious ones such as fictional stories being published as factual ones is unacceptable. Other regulations are controversial. Can an interview with a minor be used without parental consent? Are there certain situations in which negating the privacy law allowed? Journalism “has no standards of admittance and no board of review”(everything2: Journalism Regulation). Therefore if a journalist breaks regulation rules they have no license to take away as a physician or an engineer would. Not only do they not have a license for their profession, but it would be illegal to issue them one.  According to the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”.  Even though most countries have no such law they still agree on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says,  “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression through any media”.  Instead a written form of conduct is used to keep moral levels in place.  These regulations are the same throughout online journalism, TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines.  Magazines and television tend to bend these rules as much as possible though.

The Internet is evolving very quickly and who knows what will be available next. Cyber journalists will keep growing and informing the public. I believe that regulations are not as strict as they should be. Yes, there is a lot that news companies are protecting the public from but there is a lot more that could be done about what is shown on the Internet.

Questions:

1.     Do you think the amendment should be tweaked in order for journalists to have to have a license for their profession?

      2.     Are there really any regulations as to what’s on the Internet?

3.     If the public is allowed privacy then why aren’t celebrities allowed theirs?

 Sources

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_journalism

Journalism Resources compiled and edited by Karla Tonella, University of Iowa

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/journalism/cyberjournalism.html

Poynteronline:

New Media Timeline

http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=75818

Committee of Concerned Journalists:

Online Journalism Ethics: A New Frontier

http://concernedjournalists.org/online-journalism-ethics-new-frontier

ViewMagazine.tv:

The video journalist Decree

http://viewmag.blogspot.com/2007/03/video-journalist-decree.html

CNN

www.CNN.com

The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/

YouTube

www.youtube.com

ABC

www.ABC.com

NBC

www.NBC.com

Everything2:

Journalism regulation

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1506292