May 24 2018

Microchip Implants – Final Paper

Peunde Gaye

MCS 244- Communication in Society

Spring 2018

Final paper.

 

MICROCHIP IMPLANTS

 

Throughout the years, many new inventions were introduced into the digital word. Smart phones, tablets, and household electronics such as Alexa has taken over. It seems as if there is a new breakthrough everyday. In this essay, I will be talking about the microchip implant. I believe the microchip implant is the next big thing and I believe the microchip implant will make history sooner or later. A human microchip implant is typically an identifying integrated circuit device or RFID transponder encased in silicate glass and implanted in the body of a human being. RFID microchips, embedded under the skin with a procedure that’s already cheap and available, provide a digital interface to the real world centered about the holder’s identity: your ID, credit card information, bus pass, library card, and many other sources of information you currently carry in your purse/wallet can instead be stored on an RFID chip under your skin.

The microchip implant is nothing new. In many different places in the world, some people are able to open doors, start cars, and control their computers just by moving their hands or arms. These people are the first wave of people who have voluntarily allowed a miniature computer chip to be placed inside of their bodies. The microchip implant is very controversial in many different ways. Some people believe that the microchip is just another way for the government to spy on individuals and know what they are doing and when they are doing it. Religious people believe that this is the mark of the beast.

Just like everything else in the digital world, the microchip implant has some pros and also has some cons. Lets start of the with pros. Identification is one of the most important pros of the microchip implant. Our passports already have microchips, and airports, train stations, and bus stations transitioning from scanning your passport to scanning your arm would be a minimal infrastructure change. Same goes for your driver’s license and ID: all the police need is a chip scanner and you can ditch your wallet completely. Also, every year, about 28,000 babies get mixed up in hospitals every year. These kind of mix ups can also take place in funeral homes. A microchip implanted at birth help less-capable people be able to identify themselves. The microchip implant can also help when it comes to medical business. A simple scanner can tell your doctor what you’re allergic to, what antibiotics you’ve been prescribed to in the past, and what medicines you are currently taking. This is important because in case of an emergency and you are unconscious, doctors will be able to help and take care of you accordingly.

Another benefit is that it will be harder for theft to go on. Using the RFID chip in your palm to pay for things, borrow books, or open doors isn’t much different from using the RFID in a plastic card in your wallet. There’s at least one notable difference though: you can lose or get your wallet stolen pretty easily. Parts of your body are a lot harder to steal. Additionally, it’s a lot harder to criminals to secretly scan your card data when it’s embedded in your hand or arm, rather than a wallet in your front or back pocket. The microchip can also help in terms of gun control and gun laws. Browning and Smith & Wesson have already embraced an implant-firearm system that requires weapons to be within close proximity of their owner to fire. Whether your arsenal is stolen from your home or an officer’s gun is wrestled out of their hands in a struggle, no one but the registered owner will be able to fire them. This also means your kids can’t accidentally fire the pistol they found in your nightstand. This also means no more “lost weapons” at crime scenes: GPS readings in weapon chips can always report where they were, when they were fired, and who fired the actual weapon. This could be a lot of help especially in more urban areas where cases are usually never solved because nobody wants to speak with law officials.

Now let us move on to the cons of the microchip implant. Uncertainty is one of the cons. We don’t know what effects microchips will have on the body long-term. We don’t know the societal effects of widespread chipping. We don’t know what problems will arise across every facet of the idea, and we likely won’t know until we try it. Another con is data leaks. Any new technology is always rife with bugs and exploits. Putting so much information and reliance on a single chip makes it a prime target for hackers and other no-gooders. If information is writable (in addition to readable), there is also potential for impersonation or data corruption. Replacement hardware will also be a con when it comes to the microchip implant because there’s no doubt this technology will improve over time, adding more and more features. It’s possible these new features will require new hardware, and that early hardware may not have an easy way to be physically replaced. The FDA has stated that several risks for human microchipping include adverse tissue reactions, electrical hazards, and — potentially most importantly — “incompatibility” with strong-magnet medical equipment such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs). You can’t take anything metal into an MRI; that includes pacemakers, aneurysm clips, dental implants, hip/knee replacements (unless they’re nonmagnetic titanium), and embedded microchips.

The microchip implant isn’t big and popular yet, but there are some companies that are willing to give it a try. On Aug. 1, employees at Three Square Market, a technology company in Wisconsin, can choose to have a chip the size of a grain of rice injected between their thumb and index finger. Once that is done, any task involving RFID technology such as swiping into the office building, paying for food in the cafeteria can be accomplished with a wave of the hand. The program, a partnership between Three Square Market and the Swedish company Biohax International is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States, but it has already been done at a Swedish company, Epicenter. It raises a variety of questions, both privacy and health-related. The technology itself is not new. These kind chips are used as virtual collar plates for pets, and companies use them to track deliveries. But never before has the technology been used to tag employees on a much bigger and wider scale. Epicenter and a handful of other companies are the first to make chip implants broadly available.

As you can see, I believe the microchip is the future because this generation is obsessed with technology and sooner or later we will all be implanting chips into our bodies in our to go on with our daily functions.

 

SOURCES:

http://humansarefree.com/2015/03/nbc-reports-americans-will-receive.html

https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/item/18184-will-microchip-implants-in-humans-become-mandatory

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/microchips-wisconsin-company-employees.html

 

 

 

 

May 19 2018

Final Paper

Esports is defined in the Webster dictionary as a multiplayer video game played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers. Esports are the future of competition and has the potential to be just as popular as physical sports. Esports is already growing in popularity and financial opportunities for viewers, players, and sponsors. Through a mix of exciting gameplay and user generated content the sphere of Continue reading

May 17 2018

Holograms (Final Paper)

As we continue to live our lives, our technology and communication increase every single day before our eyes. Fifteen years ago who would’ve thought we’d have popular devices such as iPhones. We’ve gone from just regularly talking on the phone, to texting, and now we have applications like a FaceTime or other types of video chats through our cell phones. We can literally have video chats with anyone we want which is truly amazing. With Digital Communication and media, I feel like the next big thing is going to be holograms. Holograms are three-dimensional images formed by light beams coming from lasers or light sources. My reasoning behind why I feel holograms will be the next big thing for our future is because as the time goes on you can look at how far technology has already taken us in a matter of years. We never really expect what’s to come in our near future and some technology still amazes me. There are forms of holograms being used today and with using holograms I feel like it would substitute our way of communication and how we go on with our everyday life. The way I’m picturing it, the technology would coming projected straight through your phone or any form of projection and would be a hologram of any size of whoever you’re talking to or what you want to be able to show others. I thought of this while watching movies. I’ve been able to witness how much holograms can evolve.

Holograms could be used as maps, can save certain conversations and movements but better yet can save moments. Imagine wanting to go back to one of your favorite moments from a time in your life and now have the ability to look back at that time or watch someone express that message. Instead of having limited space on video when you can get the whole experience. According to theconversation.com, it is suggested that display holograms will be worth 5.5 billion dollars by the year 2020. Holograms will be able to improve training, designs, and visuals by being able to manipulate three-dimensional designs in its early form.

One of the ways holograms are being used is by military mapping. Militaries have been using holographic images to improve reconnaissance. There is a company named One American Company that has delivered 13 thousand 3D holographic maps for the US Army. With the US Army using holographic mapping, people are now able to see three-dimensional physical features of the land they will be on. The maps have been used successfully on transportation and help with disaster evacuations. You can also see how we already have maps on our cell phones which are pretty simple to use. Having a wider virtual map that you can interact with and see everything three-dimensional sounds much more helpful.

Holograms are also being used for information storage. Knowing how we constantly use up our storage, with apps, photos, videos and music, our computers itself are holding hundreds of our daily actions and all of this storage fills up. Our phones are now able to send our videos, pictures, and notes to the cloud offered by apple where you can pay as little as one dollar a month for five hundred gigabytes. With holographs recording and storing your information think about how much information could be recorded. They don’t necessarily have to record only visual objects, they can record your pure data which means holograms can obtain more data thank you can imagine. It’s said that prototypes can store 4.4 million individual pages of information and offer long-term security. Researchers have been looking for possibilities to use holographic data storage and as time continues to pass they get closer and closer to getting a usable system. Computing begins based on light rather than electricity. The goal is to one day make holographic storage a solution.

There have been people who get holograms made of them and their family and watching these memories back in a virtual reality headset. Being able to watch certain memories of your family or even looking around with a virtual reality headset and then seeing a two-year version of your kid just to make you see and feel how it felt to be at that time of your life. The idea of capturing memories is brilliant because I know a lot of people forget or wish they can be taken back to the moment of time. Now according to Lauren Goode (theverge.com), there have been programs where they create a natural language processing system where you can actually gain a conversation with the hologram and it wouldn’t give you typical robotic answers. At the Shoah Foundation, Goode was able to have a conversation with a still-living Holocaust survivor who is named Pinchas Gutter. It was a holographic two-dimensional display and she has stated that the conversation felt completely natural. This is just through a two-dimensional display, soon we’ll be able to see this as a three-dimensional figure that’s being projected. It’s very impressive that people have created ways for the old holograms to have conversations with you through their data.

To continue with how holograms are being used to improve our society and how the future will continue to invest their time and money into how we can evolve this idea of holograms, it has also helped medically. The way that holograms help are for MRI’s and Ultrasound scans. Instead of looking at a computer screen you can see the full projection of the body and it can be looked at with much better detail than whats already presented to us throughout computers. There is a company in Scotland that has been very successful with using the kind of data that produces 3D images for training. The beauty of this technology is that there will be no viewing devices or any special equipment to look through, it would just be a three-dimensional image in front of your eyes.

To think about how the future will be held on how we will carry our lives and what products we will be using. With the examples, I’ve given so far prove how much we would be relying on new things like three-dimensional images and how beneficial they would be for our future. From even going as far as video chatting with friends and family, just imagine how much more we can be able to see. I’d go as far as how it has been taken place in movies such as “Black Panther”. Whenever someone was to be called there would be a holographic image of the person’s head that would beam out of their watches or wristbands in order to have a conversation like facetime but you can see the person from the chest up and a full three-dimensional image of them. Not just of a computer screen or a phone. In regards to the media aspect, I feel like actual TV’s will be gone in the future as well. Maybe screen’s as a whole. I just believe everything will be projection through light going forward. The crazy thing is that we have seen a glimpse of how holograms work today. I can recall watching footage of a Tupac hologram during a Coachella performance in California. The hologram of Tupac was able to speak to the audience and perform some music to the point that it just felt very real. I have even seen holograms being used at events and a great example is when Rihanna launched a lingerie line, she threw an event in the city and had holograms of her all around doing different actions and posing with her new lingerie on.

This would be interesting because us humans see the world in 3D when our computer screens and televisions see it two-dimensional. Being in conference rooms and meets, it’s very beneficial for the people attending because this would be right in front of everyone. Even if you are out of town and want to be apart of a meeting, you can literally just project yourself into the conference room or where ever the meeting is taking place. This can help out a whole lot of business people who are constantly on the move and don’t have the time to travel to certain locations. As seen in the Avenger’s Infinity War this actually takes place. Having a meeting from the comfort of your own home sounds great to me especially and I’m sure I can speak for a lot of people when I say I rather work from home than be stuck in a conference room. It’s crazy how far us individuals can think to try to make these new inventions come to life so you can only imagine how different this world is going to be in the next twenty years. Having holograms to be used in our everyday life, the way we watch things may be different, the way we communicate may be different or even the way we process things may be very different than how we already do now.

Sources:
https://theconversation.com/five-surprising-ways-holograms-are-revolutionising-the-world-77886

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16613234/next-level-ar-vr-memories-holograms-8i-actress-shoah-foundation

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3249605/virtual-reality/the-future-of-3d-holograms-comes-into-focus.html

https://medium.com/@Goetz/holograms-and-the-the-future-of-meetings-a258eb777630

May 10 2018

Apps, block chain and currency

The idea of the internet is still there but it’s not a necessity anymore. With technology nowadays, there are apps for everything. We have apps for our social media outlets and we only really use the internet to look up things.  We don’t even have to go on websites to play games anymore. We can download these games straight to our phones, tablets and even our TVs.  I feel as if apps will start to take over. There will be no more internet cause we will have an app for the internet or a app that we can open and  whatever questions we have we just ask the app and multiple answers will pop up just like on google.

Currency is different in every country and not everything is worth the same. We also have apps that can do the currency for us and we can exchange money in different currencies using these apps. We have apps such as bitcoin and even chase quick pay where we can exchange money and wherever the person is at, it will change it into their currency

May 10 2018

Digital Currency

Applications, such as bitcoin or block chain, are changing the way we look at apps as we know it. It can make you money from investing with people all over the world. Reasons why I say this is because With our phones and the internet it is much easier to send money around to other people without having to depend on going to a bank. Imagine having to go to the an ATM that’s not your bank and you having to be charged to receive your money. That surcharge is very annoying. Even when sending money through apps such as Cashapp or Venmo, if you want your money instantly, you’d be charged with a surcharge. As more time goes on you can see that certain sites or stores are accepting crypto currency as a form of payment. It’s getting to the point you can even pay with Apple Pay at stores so you can see how much of an impact digital currency is making. Sooner or later I believe this will be the norm of payment. We wouldn’t be using cash anymore. It would be looked as retro as we continue to grow and everything will be digital. Great example are receipts or even movie tickets. You can still get paper ones but you can email receipts or add movie tickets to your phone wallet now. There are also people who rather use apps than web pages to get things done. Apps make actions much easier with not as much work.

May 10 2018

Mobility and Locative : Apps, Blockchain, Digital currency Industries

This week’s articles were very interesting to read, they gave me more insight on what is actually going o in this new world of cryptocurrency. I personally agree that we can benefit from this new technology but there are also big risks for individuals and big corporations. In the article tittled “Blockchain will Disrupt Every Industry” by Vala Afshar, here were very interesting points made about how we a benefit from the development of blockchain . but I also feel that this will invade peoples privacy, and i feel that by using this technologies to keep track of transactions and many other things companies and the government or those individuals that do all the decryption of  blockchains will have access to more information about individuals.

May 10 2018

Apps, blockchain, digital currency

I never noticed how much I don’t use my web browser until reading the article “ The Mobile Browser is dead, Long Live the APP.” After reading the article I tried to think of how many times I actually use my web browser, and the only time that I actually use it is if I need to google something. In the article they also mention that only 14% of people use the web browser on their phone. I found that to be crazy. There is literally an app for everything. It makes me wonder what the future would be like when it comes to the use of web browsers and would it still exist or will everything be found on apps.

I didn’t really know much about bitcoin or understand prior to reading these articles, but I see that it was very popular and some people even became wealthy because of it. Digital currency seems pretty interesting, but I don’t think I could get into it.

May 10 2018

May 10 Assignment

What I found most interesting in the articles was just how impactful digitizing things really are. Although I didn’t fully understand what exactly bitcoin and blockchains were from the reading I did get a sense of how impactful and disruptive they could be to everyday society. By taking transactions, commerce, and wealth and making it completely digital and up for grabs to the public. It does seem like digital currency has the potential to effect all forms of commerce including real estate and maybe even global trade.

According to the readings apps have changed the way we conduct business and go about our daily lives. I personally would prefer to use an app than a web browser. I find web browsers to be unattractive and unintuitive and apparently I’m not the only one. According to the article most people prefer using apps over the web browser and this would put business owners at a disadvantage if they do not adapt and only have a website with no app.

 

May 10 2018

Weekly post- May 10th

Joseph Singh

May 10, 2018

MCS

Jonah Brucker-Cohen

Class Post: Apps, Block Chain, and Digital Media

How have apps changed the digital delivery marketplace? Will digital currency be used for in the future?

Apps such as bitcoin and block chain are changing the game. I say this because it could connect you with money from all around the world. You can say since it is so reliable and it can reach from one part of the world to the other, we can have way more opportunity. And we will also as consumers be cutting out the middle man. For example one this I dislike about having a bank account is the fact that you are charged to access your money. Another thing I dislike is the fact that crime rates involving credit/debit cards are rising. As a consumer I feel we need more protection. And with block chain and Bitcoin, there goes our protection.

I feel like we defiantly should aim towards making digital currency norm. More establishments and stores should accept crypto currency as a form of pay because it would be much easier. Instead of carrying a wallet with a wad of cash, cards and personal information, you could just have your phone and pay via an app. You won’t have to risk anyone looking over your shoulder, losing money or better yet even losing your wallet. For example, when traveling via airplanes, to go out of the country you must use a passport, but if it ever got lost or stolen and someone was posing as you, what would you do?

You wouldn’t be able to do much, because it’s happening every day. One solution to that is virtual passports. Instead of carrying around a physical copy, have an app or digital copy of it so you’d never have to risk it being lost or stolen. With, I feel like that is the way we are headed in the future. Crypto currency and everything digitized will be the new norm.

May 10 2018

Apps, Blockchain, and Digital Currency

Apps, Blockchain, and digital currency are very popular now. Mostly because they are quick and easy to use. As I’ve mentioned many times in my previous posts that we live in a fast pace society. We like things to be quick and accessible or else we lose interest.  From the Forbes article “The mobile browser is dead” that users spend 14% f the time on browser and 86% on the apps. “but I understand the utility of having applications. But they contribute to a tunnel vision of what a smartphone can do”. This explains that a smart phone was created to do several things that make our lives easier and apps prevent us from having to sign in all the time on browser because the apps remember our passwords.   Bitcoin is a form of digital currency, which people are using now as a form of a bank. In the fast company article they said “In essence, bitcoin is money built and maintained by nerds, based on the premise that good nerds will outnumber the bad nerds”. This article mentions that it is a way to anonymously make transactions through the internet.