Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

There are many ways that virtual reality can be used. One way that I think of right away when virtual reality is mentioned is gaming. Ever since I was a kid I have always wanted to be in games so I think virtual reality is the way to fulfill this dream of mine. The definite pro of using virtual reality this way is to create a full immersion environment that allows people to do things that they cannot do in real life. This full immersion ability leads to many different uses of virtual reality. Like for example, in the article "Naughty Auties" battle autism with virtual interaction" they explain how people with autism are able to more easily interact with people through virtual reality. Virtual reality helps people with less social skills be able to interact more easily with others. Not only does it help people lacking social skills it can even help people with hone their skills. In the article "Avatar II: The Hospital" health care facilities are using virtual reality to help practice and hone their skills. This is very good in my opinion because virtual reality can train nurses and doctors to react better during emergencies and perform better on the operating table, saving more lives. Virtual reality also fosters creativity because in a virtual world you can create anything. If you can think of it it can appear in a virtual world, while you can also be very creative in real life, I feel like sometimes common sense limits our ability to be creative. For example, in real life if someone thinks up of a really amazing and creative idea, they might limit themselves by using common sense and say something like that is impossible and completely dismiss their creation. Virtual reality would also help us in the real world when wanting to make stuff because when you think of something impossible in a virtual setting, you can reverse engineer it to see how it was made and apply your findings in real life. The only con that I can find in virtual reality is the inability to differentiate between real life and virtual reality. I feel like for some people who use virtual reality would soon begin mixing up virtual reality with real life and start doing things they shouldn't be doing. Or even start to deny our real life and just completely immerse themselves in the virtual reality because they like what is going on in the virtual world rather than our real world, which is just avoidance and not really facing your problems. 

Citations:

"Avatar II: The Hospital" by Stephanie Simon, The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2010

iReport: 'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction by Nicole Saidi, CNN, March 28, 2008. 

Social Networking Sites

Four different social networking sites that I will be comparing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. All four of these sites may seen different at first, but I believe that they all basically serve the same general purpose, which is to connect. All four of these sites connects the users of these sites in some way, shape, or form. Facebook allows you and your friends, families, and people with the same interest to interact with each other by posting statuses, posting things on your wall or photos so that people can stay connected. Twitter, helps you to connect with your followers by letting you post things with 140 characters and using hashtags to group and connect people with the same topics in mind. LinkedIn is like Facebook, but instead of posting things about your personal life, you post things about your professional life. LinkedIn helps you to connect with people professionally to increase your networks and is basically an online profile of your resume. Last, YouTube connects people through videos. By watching videos of "you-tubers' you are basically connecting with them and their interest. The videos not just connect you with the poster of the videos but also people who have also watched the video. You can do so but going to the comment section of the video and leaving a comment to express yourself or discuss things with people. All four of these social networking sites share the same general purpose; to connect. 

Blog about Twitter

The very first difference that I see between a twitter discussion and a blackboard discussion is the amount of characters that someone can write. You can write as many things as you want on a blackboard discussion but on twitter you are very limited. Another difference between the two is the topics that are discussed on the platforms. Twitter is really just anybody discussing anything that comes to mind. Blackboard on the other-hand, is more for educational purposes and can be very specific topics pertaining to the class that you are in. I also feel that blackboard discussions are more organized making finding certain topics easier while twitter the only way you can really find topics to discuss is by looking for hashtags. Twitter discussions and blackboard discussions are also pretty much the same as an in class discussion, the only real difference is that in class discussions are in person. The really big difference between the three are the time constraints I guess. Twitter and blackboard discussions can last for a really long time as long as people are responding but classroom discussions are limited to the class time we get. All three basically serve the same purpose; to discuss, and to take the most out of the three, one who is better at writing and expressing themselves through written words should use twitter and blackboard while people who are great at public speaking and more outgoing should use classroom discussions to really be able to express themselves the best.

Social Networking

Social networking can now be used to make business decisions. In the article "Carnegie Mellon students to exploit social networks to predict success of Internet startups," By Bob Brown, students used social networking to predict the success of start ups. This is good because now venture capitalist firms can use this method to help make decisions when deciding which start ups to fund or not. Not only would it help venture capitalist firms invest in start ups, it would also help small time investors. There can be websites now where individual investors join to talk about new start ups and whether to invest in them or not. There is a good side to all this but unfortunately there is also a dark side. According to an article titled " Can you trust crowd wisdom?" by Kristina Grifantini, it turns out that some people skew reviews by reviewing many times. Now it might not sound too bad when reviewing products, but if they do the same with investment options it can really impact the investors since investors invest a lot of money based on the reviews. If an investor decides to invest in a start up company because he saw that 1000 other individuals invested in it, but it turns out that out of the 1000 investors 600 of it are from the same people then his or her thinking would be different and the investment decision maybe different. There is a good and a bad in these technologies but there is no doubt that these technologies will surely continue to evolve in the future. I think that what would be great in the future in social networking with investments, would be the inclusion of artificial intelligence when making investment decisions. There can be a social networking website where individuals come together to talk about start ups and there can also be ai's involved with different personality to make decisions. That would be awesome. 

1. Carnegie Mellon students to exploit social networks to predict success of Internet startups By Bob Brown, NetworkWorld Newsletters, 03/23/10 . Available athttp://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58866?source=NWWNLE_nlt_web_apps_2010-03-24
2. Can you trust crowd wisdom? by Kristina Grifantini, MIT Technology Review, Sept 16, 2009. Available at:http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23477/?a=f