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EDITORIALS
May/June Editorial
Facing Facebook
Karen Panetta
Every year on my birthday, I call my best friend from college, who also shares the same birthday. We were born 20 minutes apart and of course, I always tease him that I am younger than him.
This year, he sent me a quiz to test if I am considered old by today’s standards. If you answer, “yes” to any question, you are deemed “old”.
Q: Can you name the last five presidents of the United States, but cannot name the last five winners of the Television Show, American Idol?
Q: Do you still have clothes in your closet that have large lapels and football player sized shoulder pads?
Q: Do you use your cell phone more often to speak to people rather than using it to type instant text messages to communicate with them?
The quiz continues to declare you old if you don’t have a Facebook or Myspace page or if you don’t even know what these things are. According to this quiz, I am so old that I should just climb in the box and close the lid!
I decided to clean out my closet to make myself feel better. Actually, the truth is that the entire wall rack in my closet collapsed under the weight of my historic clothes collection only days after I took the quiz.
The tremendous crash woke me from bed. I was certain that someone was either breaking into the house or that I was in the middle of an earthquake. When I surveyed the damage in the morning, the closet looked like a closet from a Three Stooges episode. There, on the floor, glaring up at me was an endless sea of outdated clothes, just as the quiz had predicted. The wall racks had ripped the toggle bolts right out of the plaster.
The wall looked like Swiss cheese and there was no way it would ever be structurally safe enough for replacement racks.
I began disaster recovery procedures and discarded all my clothes from the 1980’s. It was far time I moved into the 90’s. You might ask why I didn’t decide to move into the current 2009 styles. I actually do have these styles, they are in my garage and they are called “rags”. This collection consists of faded, ripped and fatal laundry encounters of colored clothes with bleach. They sell in the mall for outrageous prices. I use them to wash my car.
I was still licking my wounds after my failure on the quiz. What bothered me most was that I am an engineer developing new technology, teaching leading edge technology and yet I was not using leading edge communication technology that was so common place such as Facebook and Myspace.
For those of you not familiar with these, they are on-line communities. Having a Facebook page is sort of like having a personal webpage, only other people can post things directly to your page, effectively letting them add content to your page. It also has some template information, such as your birth date, place of employment, educational history and marital status. You are free to leave these blank if you choose. I filled mine in with fictitious dates. The search engine behind Facebook finds other people you may know from your past employment, school, geographic area or interests.
There’s also a window that says “What are you doing now?” This is to provide your viewers or “friends” with your most up to date activities.
I was shocked to see the vast amounts of private information that people had on their Facebook page. People fill in the “What are you doing now?” box with answers like, “I’m on vacation in the Bahamas”. Are these people crazy or have I been working in the Homeland Security area too long? Why provide information that can help thieves know when you are not at home or provide them with personal information to make stealing your identity easier? My generation tries to protect its identity in vein and it appears the current generation knows that this information is already out there anyway, so they feel there is no loss in posting it.
When I joined Facebook, I posted a picture of myself and included the same information available on my webpage. Then I noticed that it said I had zero friends. Ouch! Just like when I was in high school.
On Facebook, you have to invite people to be your friend and they have the option to decline or accept. Once someone accepts, they can post to your Facebook page and you can see the content on their pages. I immediately began searching for my former students, since I know young people live on Facebook. I also searched for anyone from my graduating college and high school classes. I found very few from college and to my relief, none from high school.
Now this may sound mean, but when I graduated from high school, I ran from the place. Not seeing any of my former torturers on facebook either meant that all the drugs they ingested rendered them incapable of using computer technology or worse, I was indeed old as the quiz foretold.
Within 10 minutes of creating my Facebook page, new content appeared on my “Wall”. This is the area of your page where others can post their messages. The message said, “OMG, U R on FB! LOL”
Working in the encryption and security area, I was confident I could decipher this cryptic code. The translation is: “Oh my Gawd, you are on Facebook, Laugh out loud.”
Apparently, typing out the full text is now passé and only for the old folks. Due to the popularity of texting messages on cell phones, a new short hand language is mandatory for any technology savvy person.
My students then informed me that they only allowed me “restricted access” to their pages so I wouldn’t see the pictures of them drunk or naked. My question is, who DO they want to see these pictures and why would they even post such incriminating information?
Here I am trying to find the best possible picture of myself to post, even doing image processing on my pictures to deduct some pounds and these kids don’t care what they look like. I barely have time to get through my email, I honestly don’t have time to be snooping on my students’ escapades. They didn’t need to tell me this and I wish they never did!
I got myself up to a respectable number of friends, over 200 and even re-connected with old former Digital Equipment Corporation colleagues. Facebook is a good way to network and find long lost friends, relatives and colleagues. Recall, I mentioned my joy at not seeing any former high school classmates? Well that was short lived. Facebook emails you when someone posts something on your Facebook page, which started to clog my inbox. I don’t log into Facebook every day like most other users. I learned the hard way that it’s important to monitor what is being posted to your page.
I logged in and there it was, someone had posted a picture of my fifth grade class and “tagged” me in the picture. “Tagged” means that someone has identified you in a photo that has been posted. Apparently, you can’t control what pictures someone posts of you on Facebook. I am sure it wasn’t done maliciously, but I have no control to apply my image processing skills to improve my appearance.
There were also pending requests from the most horrendous classmates that had tortured me in high school requesting to be my “friend”. The good thing about Facebook is that you can create your own circle of friends and decide who you allow into your circle.
Like all internet communities, there can still be misuse on Facebook. In one case, someone set up a bogus page with another person’s picture and actual biographical information. The culprit then started posting horrible statements on the page in an effort to make it look as if the comments actually came from the victim. The victim wasn’t even aware that a Facebook page was set up in his name. The victim, a professor, was alerted when he started receiving nasty comments from people that visited his fake page. The malicious intent of this attack was to ruin the professor’s reputation purely out of revenge for a poor grade.
The other feature of Facebook you should know about is the ability to “instant message” your friends. Facebook will tell you which of your friends are logged on so that you may converse, by typing text of course, in real time. The problem for me is that I must spend more time deciphering the cryptic shorthand text they use rather than actually conversing. I prefer my friends pick up the phone and call me. Yes, I know, that’s old technology and dates me, but remember, I failed the quiz so I’m done for anyway.
Most people prefer using Facebook now because it prevents outsiders from sending SPAM emails. It is also a great way to let people know about upcoming events. I was excited to see that there is an IEEE network and an IEEE Boston group on Facebook. My number of Facebook friends skyrocketed after I joined the IEEE Facebook network. Shortly after, I received a message from one of my former high school classmates. The message said, “OMG, U & UR IEEE FB Fs R all wavers!”
The translation is: “Oh my Gawd, you and your IEEE Facebook Friends are all brainwavers.” I’m happy to report that this is a compliment.
I hope to see you all soon on our IEEE network on Facebook!
April 2009 Editorial
What! Another theory! Bah Humbug!
Hal Goldberg
Publications chairmanIn spite of my delusions to the contrary, I’m not the smartest guy in the world, not even close. But, maybe those who are a lot smarter than I am, aren’t that smart either. Maybe, just maybe, they’re not right.
The atmosphere is warming, right? Although, considering this winter, I wonder if that ought to be reevaluated. Nevertheless, the planet seems to be heating anywhere from one degree per decade to one degree per fifty years, whichever report you believe. Also, in the past 50 years the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air has jumped from 315 ppm to 370 ppm. Wow, 55 ppm, a big change! These are facts. Now comes the conclusion.
Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, its increase is the major cause of global warming! Right? Well---maybe, only maybe.
That conclusion seems to satisfy our scientists but I’m not sure it sits well with my engineering mind. Let’s look at some other facts. In round numbers, our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, 1% water vapor, 0.93% argon, 0.035% carbon dioxide and some trace gases. Water vapor, it seems, is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2. And there is almost 30 times more of it than of CO2.
So why isn’t water vapor the accused culprit?
Because water vapor percentage isn’t increasing! And carbon dioxide percentage of the atmosphere, up 55ppm, has ballooned over 15%.
But that’s a change of only 0.0055% of the atmosphere, less than 1/100th of one percent! It sure has to be a wondrous gas for that small a change in our atmosphere to make that much of a difference. Maybe carbon dioxide is the culprit. Trust the scientists. Trust Al Gore. There are a lot of inferences, but I have never seen a real “smoking gun”. Maybe there is one, but until I’ve been hit on the head with it, I’d be inclined to look elsewhere before jumping on that bandwagon. Couldn’t the real cause be just the fact that we’re heating the atmosphere with nothing but “heat”? We sure are pumping a lot of added BTU’s into the air from power plants, automobiles, industry, even war.
If that’s the case, decreasing our CO2 dissipation and injecting the same heat into the air as water vapor won’t do a thing for us. This, of course, is conjecture. It assumes that CO2 is not the culprit.
Remember, I’m not so smart. Ask my kids. But, according to the great “Theory of Goldberg”, it is not the gases that are cozying up the planet; it is the sheer heat, entropy, which we’re putting into the atmosphere. If this is true, it calls for an entirely different set of solutions.
It means we don’t have to be selective of the fuels we use. It means, only that we’ve got to cut down, drastically, on all heat dissipation and generation. From the standpoint of primary power, all fossil fuels are no-go’s. Nuclear energy is highly marginal and the primary sources have got to be solar, wind, geothermal and water, whether from dams, rivers, or ocean.
We can’t get rid of personal transportation, so automobiles have got to be electrically or mechanically powered. Since I haven’t seen a flywheel that will supply 300 miles of energy, capacitors, or some other electrical storage, seem to be the modus operandi. This concept awaits the development of a suitable energy storage device.
Fuel cells would be out because this just changes the effluent, but generates about the same heat. The concept of clean energy would have to be reevaluated, not toward reducing CO2, but toward reducing all heat generation.
This would change the entire paradigm. Energy reduction would take center stage. Oil becomes just one component of the general global warming program. Emphasis would now be on reducing all energy used, not just the method of producing or utilizing it.
Really, it’s not so bad. Wind farms would abound. They can be pretty, dotting the landscape. In the desert areas where there is an abundance of sun there will also be massive solar energy complexes with automatic focusing. And in the hills the mountain streams and rivers will support giant turbines. Unfortunately, there must be a few nuclear power sources since, try as we might, the really clean generation machines just won’t have enough capability to handle the nation and support emergencies and growth.
Since the whole distribution system will change, what a wonderful opportunity this would be for our power industry, to do something right. This would be the opening for knowledgeable engineers to design a grid that makes sense, that minimizes the downtime from blackouts and overloads and that provides efficient power distribution.
Another way to cool the planet is to reduce our biggest heat source. How about reducing the heat energy from the sun? It’s been discussed, but never really seriously. How about selectively promoting cloudy days. Aircraft contrails have been shown to reduce solar heating. Clouds or haze should do it also. This becomes another arrow in the arsenal of weapons to reverse the curve.
This is all based on the conjecture that our global warming is caused by 6 billion people with their own special energy needs and mobility requirements using too much energy, which, when combined with natural sources, overheats our planet. It, proposes that the oil dependence touted throughout the world is irrelevant and that the CO2 emphasis is a red herring.
Of course, as my kids will no doubt tell you, I’m not so smart. So, of course, I’m probably wrong. But, what would be wrong in pursuing this goal even if the Theory of Goldberg were incorrect and CO2 is the culprit after all. It just bypasses an intermediate step since, whether I’m right or wrong today, some time in the future we’ll have to cut back. Let’s go for the jugular the first time.
“Theory of Goldberg”! It has just the right ring to it.
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Updated: June 11, 2009.