The Prodigal Sons

My greatest fear is one of my old inventions turning into a mischievous wayward child.  If the devout Mormon Philo Farnsworth knew that the television he invented would be used for adult entertainment, he would likely try to disown it.  Unfortunately, great modern inventions sneak out of their cozy bedrooms and paint the town red: Facebook has its share of cyberbullies and adulterers, e-mails are being seized by governments with questionable intentions, and Twitter feeds are used to organize violent flash mobs.  If I was an inventor whose product was used for evil, I’d feel a great responsibility to minimize its negative effects but feel completely powerless to do so.  The best I can do is to keep the fatted calf waiting at home while I await the prodigal son’s return.

Not a True Sport?

Some would say that professional Starcraft is not a true sport because it involves sitting in front of a computer (sometimes in front of thousands of screaming Koreans).  However, other than the obvious physical benefits of traditional sports, not much of a difference exists between cyber-sports and traditional sports.  Both have professional teams, intense competition, bitter rivalries, outrageous scandals, crazed fans, and demanding training routines.  At the end of the day, the dedication, training, and mental toughness that it takes to be a world champion in Starcraft is almost no different than what it takes to win a Super Bowl ring.  Anyone that considers cyber-sports to be inherently inferior to normal sports misunderstands what it means to be a “sport.”

Should video games be banned?

In this video, I talk about whether video games should be banned or not.  Feel free to view it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euwnkhsDFwA&list=HL1385009041&feature=mh_lolz

The Death of the Single Transaction (and the Birth of the Gaming Addiction)

With such headlines popping up as "Teenager kills girl to feed video game habit" and "Teen Beats Mom to Death Over Playstation," many perplexed individuals are increasingly concerned about the highly addictive nature of the modern video game. Others wonder why they keep returning to the lousy Farmville game to check on their virtual livestock. The answer lies in the fundamental change in the video game marketers' business model: the shift from single transactions to multiple micro-transactions. 

In the humble origins of the home console, the consumer would physically drive to the nearest store and buy a video game for between 20$ to 50$.  That single purchase used to be all the revenue that the game developer could make from that consumer for that particular video game.  Moreover, the revenue generated would be the same if the person played the game for 30 minutes or played it for 200 hours.  The marketers' and developers' only task was to get the game off the shelf and nothing more.

The advent of the internet and the facilitation of micro-transactions has ultimately changed that business model.  The developer can now sell more to the consumer while the consumer is playing the game, resulting in many opportunities for micro-transactions.  In Farmville, the player can buy extra coins in the video game for real-life money.  In World of Warcraft, the player has to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue playing the game.  Even free-to-play video games gain more revenue through advertisements!

This new change in the video game business model has provided game developers with every financial incentive to make their game more addicting to the consumer.  The more a consumer plays a game, the more likely he/she will make an in-app purchase or view more advertisements.  As responsible consumers of digital entertainment, we need to be aware of the motivation behind the addictive properties of video games so we can more easily avoid crippling video game addictions.  At the very least, we can have a great excuse handy as to why we didn't accept our Facebook friends' Farmville invitations.

False Assumptions on Sexist Discrimination

All engineers worth their bits know that a program won’t ever function correctly if its logic is based on false assumptions.  Unfortunately, politicians’ careers do not depend on the airtight validity of their assumptions like those of engineers.  Senator Ron Wyden makes a false assumption that the declining participation rate of women in computer science can be mostly explained by discrimination, which “[pushes] women into traditional female roles, such as teaching.”  Who is doing the discrimination, Ron Wyden?  In my university, the only step between a woman and a seat in an introductory CS course is an online class registry sheet waiting for her consent.  If a conscious choice not to study a certain field is unequivocally the result of discrimination, shouldn’t we also be concerned about the fact that only 18.3% of middle school and high school teachers were men in 2011?  Should we also be concerned that the prospect of fatherhood pushes men into more traditional male roles, such as engineering?  Maybe we shouldn’t be concerned, since it is not politically beneficial to discuss those disparities.

Programmers Are More Social Than You

The prevailing stereotype of the hunchbacked, hygiene challenged programmer enclosed in a dark basement is inaccurate at best.  The truth is that many programmers are much more social and collaborative with other human beings than originally thought.  Imagine this scenario: you’ve moved into a new neighborhood and you’ve built a brand new house from the ground up.  Several of your neighbors stop by and decide that your house can be something much bigger and better, so they add on a basketball court, a tennis court, and a full-length swimming pool at no cost for labor.  These are some social and friendly neighbors!  As it turns out, thousands of programmers collaborate in software development in online open-source projects like Firefox, Linux, and Wordpress.  If the rest of the professional world was as social (and generous) as open-source programmers, we’d have free mechanics in our garages fixing our cars, free heart surgeons in our hospitals performing life-saving operations, and free plumbers fixing those pesky leaks underneath the sink!  Now, don’t you wish that everyone was as social as a typical programmer?

Teachers Are the Most Human of Us All

The excessive use of technology has a dehumanizing influence over any group of people near the omniscient influence of a space satellite.  However, if we look on the space satellite’s silver lining, we would discover that one group among us is becoming more human: people who teach as an occupation.  Consider that LDS missionaries switched from robotic, scripted missionary lessons to more dynamic and interactive lessons since the introduction of Preach My Gospel in 2004.  Also consider that school teachers have recently begun to make more interactive lessons for their students in order to compensate for their students’ shorter attention spans.  As a result, both teachers and missionaries are evolving from their genetic roots as human tape recorders into powerful instructors who teach lessons from their own words.  If we could only put away our smartphones and give teachers our undivided attention, we’d become a little more human too.

Billy Goats and Patent Trolls

Patent trolls, a subset of non-practicing entities, have simultaneously stifled innovation and increased the prices of technological goods.  Their modus operandi is to buy patents off dying companies at low prices and then use those patents to sue practicing entities for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  I’m sure these overpaid litigators enjoy the high financial rewards of such lawsuits, especially since they have the unfair advantage of not needing to specify their charges until after legal charges have been mounted.  However, I believe that behind the scaly green exterior of the cold-hearted patent troll is a human being itching to escape.  If anyone reading this is a patent troll, consider the harmful effects that such meaningless litigation has on the United States economy:  the prices of technological goods rise while the rate of innovation falls.  Because of a harsh litigious environment, many tech companies go bankrupt defending against patent troll lawsuits while the tech companies that do survive also have to raise the prices of their goods to compensate for legal expenses.  Unless these litigators don't want to see the cure for cancer anytime soon, they had better apply their gifted legislation skills elsewhere.

Bad Security Habits Die Hard

In Clifford Stoll’s book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” Stoll tells about his cyber-manhunt to find a hacker of government computers several years before the World Wide Web.   Hopefully, the government has learned a few things about cyber-security since then: Stoll mentioned that the hacker accessed classified information using factory-default passwords and even at times through “low-privileged” guest accounts.  For the unlearned in computer-security, this makes a computer about as secure as a house with its front door hanging open.  At that point, be a good host and just leave the family credit card on the table for the uninvited houseguests. 

With the introduction of the Obamacare data hub, 27 years after Stoll’s manhunt, the government better start building an impenetrable stone wall around its citizens’ data.  Without proper security measures, sensitive data can land in the hands of an imposter and bring about a tempest of financial peril.  The average cost of a compromised identity runs about $5,000 and around 10 million Americans already pay that cost every year.  

The stone wall has not been built yet, unfortunately.  The current implementation of the Obamacare website doesn’t even employ some of the most basic security measures.  The website allows “all-access requests for other sites,” which could end up in an all-access request from a website of unscrupulous origin.  The site also doesn’t prevent access to browser cookies, allowing an attacker to get financial and marital status information if the user has cookies enabled.  Moreover, the site doesn’t even prevent automated login attacks by requiring a photo captcha after login to verify that the user is human.  Without such basic security measures, hackers can attack the system until they exploit its vulnerabilities and obtain what they want: someone’s identity.

Easy access to highly sensitive information may be the quality of security expected from the public sector, but it is certainly not the quality that the American people need to keep their identities secure.   Although Obamacare has the noble aspiration of bringing healthcare to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, its supporters had better look past its politics and take its technical challenges more seriously.  When the Obamacare data hub becomes fully functional, so will thousands of identity thieves trying to extract its data.  At this point, there would not be enough Clifford Stolls in the world to stop them.  

Self-fulfilling educational prophecies

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/business/deciding-who-sees-students-data.html?hp&_r=0&_r=3&

InBloom, a data repository currently in development, would collect information on school students and their academic performance all throughout their years of grade school.  The data of previous school performance would then assist teachers in how to better instruct their students, either by shaping lesson plans accordingly or creating a seating chart which would spread out the “good” and “bad” students.  While this development has admirable aspirations, it runs the risk of creating negative self-fulfilling prophecies.  When a student is labeled as a “good” or “bad” student from the start of each year, the student may end up carrying this self-identity throughout grade school.  Moreover, if teachers see students in “green,” “yellow,” or “red” (as inBloom labels them), the teachers may help reinforce the identity, good or bad.  When Albert Einstein underperformed in his first years of school, would it have been beneficial to label him as a “RED” student?

Reinventing the Tree

Unless you live in a time paradox and your great grandma Elizabeth was born in both Massachusetts and overseas in England, you probably would be alarmed to find two online records of Elizabeth with mostly identical information. Since most of the non-CS population is completely unaware of the intricacies of data integrity, many people happily sign onto family history websites to input their family information only to inadvertently duplicate an already existing record. Features exist on these websites to suggest possible duplicates, but in no way can those features detect all of them. I am most definitely pleased that so many people are passionately researching their family history, but I also believe that people who use family history websites should carefully search to see if their ancestors' records already exist in the website's data before submitting new records. This way, we can make sure that we can complete more family trees instead of continually reinventing the wheel – or rather – reinventing the tree.

LAUSD gets more than what it bargains for

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/09/25/lausd-halts-home-ipad-use-after-students-hack-security-locks/

Most politicians espouse the virtues of technological education during this age of such rapid technological advancement, but they may need to be careful what they wish for: hundreds of kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District hacked district-issued iPads within one week of receiving them.  The iPads were originally configured to disable counter-productive websites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, but such security measures have been breached by the technologically competent students.  As a computer science student, I feel that the ultimate irony is that school officials are discouraging this “unwanted behavior.” The high school students have demonstrated an ability to find security loopholes in software, and such skills are very valuable in software development.  Just search “security” on dice.com and over 16,000 search results will appear on the page.  Besides, saying “detected security hole on iPad software” looks a lot more impressive on a resume than simply saying “used an iPad.”

Mark Zuckerberg is the Modern Prometheus

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/09/17/iran-restores-blocks-on-facebook-twitter/2824479/

Facebook has become Frankenstein's monster, and Mark Zuckerberg is its creator. Never has a social networking application stirred up such controversy: government agencies have relentlessly mined its cornucopia of intel, companies have fired employees over unflattering party photos, and old flames on Facebook draw away their former lovers from existing faithful relationships with flaxen cords. As a computer science student, I can't help but nervously feel the watchful eyes of my friends (and potentially my future employers) as I post a status on my Facebook page. On the other hand, Facebook is only an application distributed over several parallel processing servers that understands no ethics but only bits. No one forces anyone to post controversial Facebook statuses (except sometimes your “friends” will tag you in unflattering photos from last year's Halloween party.) The only power Facebook has to affect anyone's life is the power that the individual willingly gives to it.

Sabba-video-game-phobia, or the fear of playing video games on the Sabbath.

After a nice lunch at my wife’s grandparents’ house a few Sundays ago, we were greatly discouraged from playing Sonic All-Stars Racing over a blue-tooth connection on our iOS devices in fear of being “irreverent” on the Sabbath.  Instead of committing the cardinal sin of playing video games on Sundays, we decided to honor the Mosaic law and pull out an old Parcheesi board.  With great respect to her wonderful grandparents, I do not understand what the difference is between playing a round of Parcheesi on a kitchen table and playing Sonic All-Stars Racing over a blue-tooth connection.  Both can provide entertainment to a familial group of four, but one is done through a technological medium and the other is done through a less sophisticated cardboard medium.  Neither game is inappropriate for the young whipper-snappers, and both games are equally capable of turning good people into terrible sports.  For those who do ban playing video games on the Sabbath, do some introspection and ponder the difference between a (G-rated) video game and a board game.  Both engage multiple players simultaneously, both encourage fun competition, and both are potentially great ways to spend time with family.  Both sound like great Sabbath-day activities to me.