Dreamspark

Microsoft announced Tuesday the launch of a new student software giveaway program called Dreamspark. Here is an article form the Washington Post article covering this new program. The new program mostly differs from their other similar programs like MSDN academic alliance in student scope. Dreamspark is available to all students regardless of the major being pursued. What caught my interest in the article were a few snippets injected by the journalist about Microsoft’s motive. It made me wonder if a company like Microsoft could do anything without their motives being criticized? I’m not making a judgment, just asking a question. If they did something truly benevolent would anyone ever know, or would we always assume that there is some hidden agenda? And is it even worth them trying? Have we created an environment where it is not even worth being benevolent?

Church History

This semester I am taking a class covering Family History. As I have started to delve into this never-ending project, I have been interested to see an internet phenomenon that I am starting to notice more and more throughout the entire internet. The internet is making us lazy. Just because you look up look up some names and you copy & paste them in to PAF doesn't mean you have done any work. In the few databases that I have looked at there has been a lot of duplication. Even these duplicated records have done a poor job of replication. Still, I guess it is a small price to pay for the power and ease-of-use that the internet affords us.

Efficiency

Reading some articles recently about the use of technology in the Church has prompted me to ponder what effect technology is having on the Church and the Gospel. The Gospel itself is timeless; its relevance extends through eternity. Technology should not change what we teach and what we practice. We teach and practice the same gospel Jesus taught two thousand years ago even if we read scriptures in Sunday school off a PowerPoint presentation. So if the gospel stays unchanged by technology, what effect is it having on the Church as we continue to embrace it?

The great benefit of technology in the Church is the ability for each Church member to be more efficient in the work they do. We know that there is an overabundance of work to be done in the Kingdom of God and with technology each member is able to get more done. For example, the Church is developing a new Genealogy index and hopefully releasing it this year. In the past, a great deal of effort has been repeated and therefore wasted. The new index will allow patrons to connect themselves to the work already done so that there are not multiple versions of the same person because there were multiple submissions. This is only one example, but technology is allowing us to do more work with less effort.

American English

I have often wondered who defined American English rhetoric and how they did it. Having read William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s little book titled The Elements of Style I am beginning to see how it is done. Language has fluid nature and is constantly in a state of evolution. We are constantly transforming our language in our quest to better transfer information by creating new words, dropping words from our vocabulary and even changing the mean of previously defined words. With the number users reaching upward to 250 million it would seem impossible for such a large group to come to an agreement on how to use this product. We don’t of course but through the influence of style guides like The Elements of Style we are able to stay on the same page enough to understand one anther.

A MPAA retraction

Unable or unwilling to hide their mistake any longer, the MPAA released a statement Tuesday correcting a three-year-old study concerning piracy on college campuses. The years of silence should cause people to question the biased nature of the MPAA's studies. While they are not more susceptible then any other group or person, they are biased. Therefore, studies paid for by the MPAA are inherently going to carry that bias. An independent study is needed and should be conducted if lawmakers, university presidents and other concerned parties want a clear and accurate picture of the economic effect of piracy. A study not bought and paid for by 'the home team'.

Innovation

In the brevity of a history class or a history book, I often get caught up in the misconception of the world having been in a constant state of change. In one lecture or a few pages, the causes and effects of centuries can be outlined and appear to be happening almost at once, when in reality the difference from one past generation to the previous one was small as was the difference to the next. Ever steady, history made its mark. However, this misconception is becoming a reality in modern history because of Technological Innovation.

In his article Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change, Neil Postman takes a deep look at the nature Technological Innovation. He discusses how these ‘enhancements’ have changed the human experience in deep and irrevocable ways. But beyond the effects of the innovation itself, how are we as a culture affected as these society-changing events become increasingly frequent? How will our culture develop if we never have a chance to mature—to take in where we are and where we have been—before we are changed by the newest innovations? Can we stand the neck-breaking acceleration of change without becoming disjointed?