Change the World

Gandhi, preacher of non-violence, leave to us this words full of significance. I can't just desire the world to change until I, personally, change. Change yourself, then change the world. He also means that we can't be selfish, and think just about our personal goals. We are part of a world made of violence, wars, and injustice. We can't be beholders of its ruin. Make this world a better place, cotribute to the community. Personally, I feel like I want to do something with my life that would help this world. I still don't know exactly, but I have to try, for the words of this man, and for the world.

Blog Post Assessment

Five Guys is definitely my favorite American restaurant.

It was founded in 1986 by Janie and Jerry Murrel. Their sons, Matt, Jim, Chad, Ben and Tyler were the original "Five Guys". Today all sons are involved in the market: Matt and Jim travel the country visiting stores, Chad oversees training, Ben select the franchisees, and Tyler runs the bakery. The first Five Guys was in Arlington's Westmont Shopping Center and now restaurants are all over the North-America and Great Britain.

The restaurant serves burgers, fries and kosher style hot dogs, grilled cheese and vegetable sandwiches. Its specialties are for sure the burgers, in which you can add crispy bacon, american cheese, and many vegetables, and french fries cooked in pure. Besides, you can have every kind of refillable drinks, awesome milkshakes, and free peanuts!

Personally, that's my favorite American restaurant because of the quality of its burgers and fries. I've never had a bacon-cheeseburger like the one in Five Guys, and the fries don't need ketchup to be tasty. When I go back to Italy I will have to open one there because I can't live anymore without it.

Discuss Questions

Discussion Questions

Why did you select the sites you subscribed to?

Was it easy to find feeds and to subscribe to them?

Which sites were your favorites?

What else can you use RSS feeds for?

How likely are you to continue to use RSS feeds in the future?

1. I selected the sites I subscribed to because they interested me.
2. It was pretty easy. I just found difficult to look for government feeds, because I don't know many departments.
3. My favourite sites are in the personal folder.
4. I can use RSS feeds to have news I'm interested in without long researches on the web.
5. I will use RSS feeds to stay informed about new scientific discovers. 

Sony-pocalypse

Sony hack is one of the worst hacks ever

 

In a single week, hackers have brought Sony Pictures, a major Hollywood studio, to its knees.

It's so devastating that other companies are being warned by FBI about the malicious software that infected Sony's computers. A security researcher, Adrian Sanabria, calls it "Sony-pocalypse".

• Leaked movies: Every stolen copy of a movie is potentially a movie ticket lost. "Fury", the drama starring Brad Pitt has been downloaded illegally 2.3 million times.
• Embarrassing: The hack has produced some embarrassing internal communications, including some memos that show Sony employees are fed up with the boring, unimaginative movies Sony keeps producing.
• Unequal salaries: The world now knows that employees are paid according to gender and race lines.
• Personal information: 3,800 employees must be on guard for identity theft. Hackers have exposed personal data on the web. 

All of this has been posted in illegal file-sharing websites, using computer servers owned by Sony's PlayStation Network, adding insult to injury. Hackers took more than hundred terabytes of data, a number so huge that it will take a year or more for Sony to go through it all and deal with the damage. Some executives think it might be North Korea, because of the nearly released comedy, "The Interview" by Sony, about a plot to kill North-Korean leader, Kim Jong-Un.

 



Do Now Writing Prompt

If I were a teacher in this school, I would add a new class to the curriculum, called "Introduction to engineering". The students could approach for the first time to engineering. Students would learn how to connect physics with machinery, and create their own designs. Students would be graded at first with tests and homework, then, when they learn the basic knowledge, they could start working in groups, create new designs and build their models.

My class would be pretty cool, with a variety of tools and chromebooks, so that students can work easily with internet. If students do a very good job with their projects, these will be presented in my class. Probably, it will be messy.

The Germans have figured out how to 3D print cars

It's not a sculpture: it's future of car manufacturing. The EDAG showed at the Geneva Motor Show the design concept of Genesis, a totally 3D printed car, with a beautifully crafted frame made from a range of materials and inspired by a turtle's skeleton. Even though the frame is, actually, more art than reality, EDAG's 3D printing can be used to make full-size car components. 

The final process they used was a modified version of fused-deposition modeling, or FDM: a robot built it by creating a thermoplastic model of the complex interior, even though the company says they can use carbon fiber to make the structure srtronger and lighter, and a steel exterior frame in order to protect the lattice-like monocoque.

EDAG's design is unique, because it shows that with the right equipment you can produce a structure at a massively larger scale, rather than printing out tiny parts and assemble them. However, printing of this size is still years from reality, due to both cost and scale, and it remains a vision of our future.

Wiki Dissection J.W.

1. What is the purpose of this Wiki?
2. When was the last post?
3. How was this Wiki created?
4. What would you add to it?
5. What did you learn from it?
6. If you had to create a Wiki with a team, what would be the specific topic (s)?
7. How can Wikis be used in the classroom or in education?

1) The purpose of this Wiki is to look for and discuss disruptive innovations that are occurring in education and in the classroom.

2) The last post was November 7, 2007.

3)This Wiki was created on Wikidot.com.

4) This Wiki shows the problem just from Christensen's point of view. It should add more people's perspectives.

5) From this Wiki I learnt that technology innovations can severely change the way people connect, engage, and relate with the world and transform society.

6) If I had to create a Wiki with a team,  the topic would be "the most important inventions in history of the world". We could discuss and add more and more inventions.

7) Wikis can be used in the classroom to collaborate with your classmates. It could collect information on a specific topic where students work together in order to create a complete chart of data.

Amazon's Echo

The computer of the future

Last week Amazon revealed a strange product: Echo. It's not a tablet, a smartphone, or a laptop, but a stand-alone smart speaker with a Siri-like voice-controlled service and with no screen. It plays music and connects to internet to do a large variety of things like answer questions, provide news updates and set personal reminders for you.

It's built with microphones using voice cancellation and "far-field voice recognition" allowing to pick up voice commands at normal speaking volume from all across the room. With the keyword "Alexa" the speaker's virtual assistant switch on and it gets ready to answer your questions. Also it's connected to the Cloud, running on Amazon Web Services, so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

Bizzarrely, before buying this product, you have to request an invitation to Amazon, and many ones have doubts about Echo: why would I need Echo, when I can have the same things on my iPhone or Android? Anyway, Echo makes me realize we're extremely close to the future we're dreaming of: the development of a smart home device could be the ancestor of a fully automated home like the ones in sci-fi films. In a few years, we will fill our home with "smart" clocks, refrigerators, TVs, and security systems. Future is in front of our eyes.

Wiki Research

1. A Wiki can be used in U.S History. The teacher would assign a topic for each group of student, then these ones could create a wiki where to put information about that topic. Therefore, it's possible for the group to see each other's work, correct it and deepen it easily and quickly. At the end the class will have detailed information about the history of United States of America.
2. Using a Wiki in class each student has the possibility to see everybody's work and to discuss it easily. The class can have a document where all students collaborate in a fast way.
3. In Web 2.0 class we could create a wiki in order to have an encyclopedia on the topics we study. Therefore, it's easy for the students to find out what to do when they're asked to  blog-post, share on Google Drive,  create a link and stuff like that.
4. I've never had any experience with wikis but I can't wait to do it with the one and only awesome Mr. Porfido!

1. How can a wiki be used in a current class on your schedule (not this course)? Pick a class and be specific how the class could create and use a Wiki on a regular basis (tip: Use the Internet, here is a good source).
2. What are the benefits of using a wiki in class
3. How can we create a wiki in this class, what would we contribute to it and how would we utilize it on an on-going basis?
4. What experience do you have using or creating wikis?

My weekend

Saturday I had a lazy day and I just hung out with friends in the afternoon, while Sunday I went to New York City. It was amazing! I walked through Little Italy and Chinatown and ate Pizza in the first pizzeria in New York: Lombardi's. The pizza pie was good but my Italian American host-parents were a little upset because Chinatown took up a large amount of space of Little Italy and now this is made by just a few streets. A lot of Italian restaurants were closed and replaced by Chinese ones. Anyway, the weather was sunny and New York was wonderful. I hope I'll go back early!

Verizon's New Completely Insane Droid

Verizon's latest Droid smartphone is totally nuts. It's innovative in an extreme way:

• Gigantic battery: It has the biggest battery ever put into a smartphone, and with more than twice the size of the iPhone 6 battery, it gets 48 hours of battery life (though, charge longevity depends on how much you tax it). Also, it comes with a rapid charger that gives you 8 hours of battery life after just 15 minutes of charging.
• Insane screen: The Droid Turbo has a 5.1-inch screen with 565 pixels per hinch, which is 31% more than the Galaxy S5 and 41% sharper than the iPhone 6 plus. Moreover, the screen is "QUAD HD", or 4 times the screen resolution of a typical HDTV.
• Huge storage capacity: The phone starts at 32 GB of storage for $199 (with a 2 year contract), and at 64 GB for $249.
• Lightning-fast processor: It's the fastest phone with the Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon processor, which has been built to dazzle when you're playing games and watching videos.
• Enormous camera: The Droid Turbo has one of the biggest smartphone cameras, which includes light sensors and software.

Everyone May Have a Personal Air Vehicle

We are going to have personal air vehicles that are both cars and planes. Here's what Missy Cummings, associate professor at Duke University and director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory at the MIT, think about our future. It's basically the intersection of a drone with a robotic car, so that your plane is also your car, but the big leap in technology is that you are actually DRIVING NEITHER.

We are terrible drivers, says Missy Cummings: humans have a half-second lag in almost any quick response that they need to have, while computers and automated systems have microseconds. There really aren't any technological hurdles to this idea, just psychological and cultural, in terms of giving up the car. But NO TECH NEEDS TO BE DEVELOPED to have your own personal flying car. What we have to do is improve production and reduce manufacturing costs. Hence, we need more robots.

We shouldn't worry about the machines rising up and taking over, says Cummings, but hackers and terrorists who want to do wrong. At the moment she's working on trying to develop technology that allows any flying robots to be able to fend off any attack and to navigate itself without any external signal.

It promises much in terms of safer travel, so when she looks at globalising this concept of personal air vehicles, it means we will see the quality of life improve dramatically for everyone around the world.

Google Glass Addiction

Doctors report first case of desorder

What our parents tell every time we use electronic devices for too long is true: It will drive you crazy!

A 31 year old man checked in to the U.S Navy's Substance Abuse Rehabilitation Program (SARP) this summer for treatment of alcoholism. He showed symptoms that doctors initially thought were solely related to alcohol, but they found out that even Goggle glass was a problem for him.

The patient had been wearing Glass for up to 18 hours a day, using it at work and taking it off when he went to sleep or bathed. Dr. Andrew Doan, head of addictions and resilience research at Naval Medical Center San Diego, told that the withdrawal symptoms from glass were much worse than withdrawing from alcohol: when the therapist asked him a question, he had this repeated movement of placing his index finger to the right sight of the face, similar to try to turn on the Glass, and he even began dreaming as he viewed through the eyeglass-like smart headset.

Internet addiction is not included in the latest version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but Doan insists it's a real malady. Nowadays more and more technological gadgets are proliferating and he expects to see more cases of behavioral disorders connected to technology. One of them in the Nomophobia, or the fear of being out of mobile phone contact. 

Do you want to know if you have nomophobia? Check this site!

Is demoted planet Pluto making a come back?

Pluto was discovered by the astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Febrary 18, 1930, and it was the ninth planet in our solar system.Then, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union, the group that gets to name planetary bodies, came up with some rules for what is and is not a planet. As a result, Pluto is not considered anymore as a planet, because it's too small to knock other space rocks out of its path as it orbits the sun.

The group's definitions sparked lots od debate. On September 18th the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics jumped into a debate, where some experts discussed the definition of a planet. They voted that Pluto as "the smallest spherical lump of matter that formed around stars or stellar remnants" is a planet. Also, if you put Earth where Pluto is, it would be excluded according to IAU rules.

What we used to know about the number and variety of planets was very data limited before the 21st century. Now we know that there are lots of types of planets. At present, a spacecraft is directed to Pluto: the New Horizons. Within 7 weeks we'll have much more information about Pluto, and it will finally come into focus.

Hello Ello

Hello Ello (Peace out, Facebook!)

Nowadays, the world of social networks is getting more and more competitive. Even Facebook is risking with the coming of Ello, the new ad-free social network that's told the "Anti-Facebook".

In fact, while Facebook is suspending the accounts of several gays and transgender entertainers, Ello doesn't ask the name, gender or sexual orientation; you just must respect Ello's rules.

The social network, born a little more than a month ago, is accessible just by invite and during this week it's getting 40.000 requests and approvals an hour. It started one year ago as private where friends could share their artwork and communicate. Therefore, more and more people wanted to join and, the producers decided to make it public.

However, it's not easy to create an ad-free social network that can compete with the big Facebook, that earns 90% of the total profit with advertising. Instead, Ello's business model is like an app store: people can customize their experience on the platform buying special features, so that the producers will be able to monetize the social network.

The two faces of Wikipedia

An editorial is an opinion piece written by the senior editorial staff. I found interesting this article that talks about Wikipedia and how it's changed since its born in 2001.

My teachers told me to be careful to use Wikipedia as information source because everybody can edit it and the information could be incorrect or wrong. Therefore, most of them don't allow me to work on it, while others make me use it just as a starting point of my researches.

I've never thought about what was exactly Wikipedia; I just saw it as a reliable information source. Now, thanks to this article, I understand that it's important to have quickly information which, however, could be incorrect. Therefore, it's something useful to use carefully. 

A brighter future: five ideas that will change solar energy

Nowadays technology is improving quickly and the industry involved in researches in renewable energy created new technologies in the range of solar energy. Panel that never lose their focus: Their self-tracking solar concentrators can change their reflectivity depending on the direction of incoming sunlight. Therefore, they provide much more electricity than any other kind of panel. New solar panels from old car batteries: Old car batteries are being converted into long-lasting solar panels by researchers at MIT. Lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households. The new color of clean energy: Lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households.  Solar power with a view: A new solar concentrator has been developed which can be placed over windows to create solar energy. The solar harvesting system uses small organic molecules which absorb specific non-visible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and near infrared. Solar cells that keep their cool: Solar cells can easily reach temperatures as high as 55 degrees Celsius. Some scientists at Stanford University have developed a glass that can redirect any infrared radiation which causes heat, preventing the solar cells from heating up.

                                       

Web 2.0 Multimedia Blog Pre-Posting

                              

This year I chose to take Biotechnology at the Wood-Ridge High School because it's the only scientific class I hadn't taken in Italy yet. Mr. Colarusso teaches there. He studied Biology and Education at Kean University, Rider College and the University of Rhode Island. He has also a passion for music, in fact actually he teaches Biology, Biotechnology and Genetics and he's also the musical director of our Drama and Musical.

Before I joined the class, I wasn't sure of what I was going to do and what was exactly Biotechnology. However, I wanted to try something new concerning sciences, and at first it was difficult for me because I didn't understand what the teacher said. Just after a couple of days I began learning about DNA, drugs, and the meaning of Biotechnology (What is Biotechnology?).

                                               

The course is not like the ones in Italy. Here the teacher, in addition to explaining concepts, let us work by ourselves and make us do many group projects. That's cool but also difficult for me because I cannot interact with them efficiently. My English is not good yet and the technical terms are hard to say and to understand. We usually use computers for the projects and scientific instruments for the experiments. 

Here's the Grading Policy:

• Tests 40%
• Homework/Participation 10%
• Laboratory Reports/Projects 25%
• Quizzes 15%
• Informal Assessments 10% 

Mr. Colarusso Home Page

Educational Technology and Copyright 

Law

The article talks about the Copyright Law, when it's applied, and how to respect it without getting in trouble. Copyright is applied in almost all cases concerning the works of authorship which include literary, written, dramatic, artistic, musical and certain other types of works. 

It protects author's idea from anybody wanting to use it for own intent without the agreement with authors, even if the work is just a doodle. But it's not always protected. It's possible to reproduce in copies for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. These are not infringement of copyright.

3D Robotics IRIS+

3D Robotics IRIS+ drone goes hands-free with Follow Me technology

GoPro Cameras are used all around the world by lovers of extreme sports, and the web is nowadays full of videos filmed by free-ride skiers and bikers with a GoPro on their helmet doing the craziest tricks to raise their popularity. But now the art of filming extreme personal videos has increased its potentiality thanks to IRIS+, the new technological product of 3D Robotics.
IRIS+ is a personal drone that's able to fly with remote control or autonomously with Mac, PC, Linux or Android device. It's a robot that automatically fly itself where you tell it to go, or you can make it do that manually using the controller. But the innovation consists in the 3PV Follow Me mode: just carrying a GPS enabled Android device, the IRIS+ can easily fllow and film you, capturing sweeping videos from a perspective unlike any other.