Glaciers of Africa

Posted on December 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

When most people think about glaciers, they do not think about Africa. However, there are glaciers in Africa too. And these glaciers are all located in sub-Sahara Africa, up top three of Africa’s biggest and highest mountains: Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya, and the Rwenzori Mountains. Although these glaciers have been there since ancient times, the glaciers of Africa are only starting to be known to people around the world. But as their popularity grows, their size is rapidly reducing. The glaciers of Africa are in imminent danger of disappearing this century. And scientists monitoring the glaciers are blaming global warming for the rapid melting of glaciers’ ice. Already climate change has caused almost eighty percent of the ice to melt, and from evidence such as photographs taken early in the 20th century,  much of this melting happened this past century, a rate undoubtedly much faster than past centuries.  Based on the rate the glaciers are melting, scientists predict they could be gone in twenty years, or by 2030.  

The melting of the glaciers is an indication of the rapid rise in temperature in the region. If these glaciers melt, they could threaten the ecosystem. Even though they are unknown to many people around the world, including Africans, these glaciers have been very important in sustaining the lives of millions of people, animals, and plants in their regions.  For example the glacier of the Rwenzori mountains, dubbed the “African Alps,” is the highest source of water for the Nile River, so “it disappearance threatens dozens of plant and animal species that call the range home.”  This threat also true for other living things that are dependent on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya.

Though the problem of the disappearing glaciers is known, the solution to the problem remains elusive and this is because as Luc Hardy, explorer and founder of Pax Arctic said, “it’s not like there’s a specific local cause that you could act on. It’s pretty much all of us, all over the world, creating C02 in the air.” The problem is caused by global warming. And for as long as temperatures keep rising, these glaciers will disappear even if the locals living near and dependent on these glaciers for fresh water are not contributing to global warming.  To solve this problem, everyone has to take responsibility for climate change. As a Kenyan Alpinist, James Kagambi said, “[a] lot of times, people think that ‘I’m only one in a billion people.’ But a’long journey starts with one step. If you want to save our world, that journey can start with one person. Do what is right, and maybe your family will follow suit, your clan will follow suit, your tribe will follow suit, and maybe your whole country will follow suit.” It is not right that regions with the lowest carbon emissions are feeling the greatest impacts of climate change.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/03/world/africa/last-chance-disappearing-glaciers/index.html

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/09/the-disappearing-glaciers-of-africa.html

https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2014/11/25/africas-last-tropical-glaciers-watch-for-free/

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Investment prospectus for ThermoVission

Posted on December 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Executive summary

Thermovission is a remote control that controls both the room temperature and the television. Thermovission is a new device that will provide comfort to customers by enabling them to easily control both the room temperature and television with a single remote control. Thermovission is taking advantage of the fact that although there are numerous universal remote controllers on the market that control multiple units of entertainment and central heating and cooling systems, there are none that control both the temperature and the television with a single controller. I believe that there is a demand for this type of remote and Thermovision will be the remote that will fulfil this need.

I have already produced a prototype for this type of remote and have proof that it is possible to network television remotes and thermostat remotes by integrating their software codes into a single remote that will control both set of devices. All Thermovission remotes will be pre-programmed at production so that all a customer has to do is enter the model numbers of their home devices to control both the room temperature and television with a single device.

The prototype for this remote is smaller than most remotes on the market. It is designed to be the most user friendly remote on the market, especially for the older demographic who I am

targeting. My remote is designed small and slim so that it can easily fit in a pocket or a packed counter. And, I have also taken measures to make sure that when it is misplaced, it can easily be found. I have designed Thermovission can be called by the telephone by dialing a unique but simple passcode that the customer easily be able to remember or set on their telephone. And to be more useful, can be used as a lighter that comes on if/when the light bulb goes off.

Thermovision is aimed at the 75 million retired or soon-to-retire Baby Boomer demographic. My target is Baby Boomers because studies show that older people are more affected by high heat during the summer and extreme cold during the winter. Every year, thousands of seniors die from weather related illnesses because of highly hot summer months and cold winter months. This is a major problem that will only increase as temperatures continue to increase in the summer and people continue to age more and increasingly live alone.

I have read research that informs me that as people get older, their bodies are less capable of regulating heat because they do not sweat as much as when they were younger. So, during the summer months, older people are more stress, dizzy, and are more prone to suffer from headaches, nausea, and getting heat strokes.

And during the winter months, older people more likely to get sick because like dealing with the summer heat, their bodies do not deal with the cold as well as when they were younger. Their bodies lose heat faster, so, they are at a greater risk of suffering from a heart attack, having kidney problems, liver damage, and other health problems as a result of the cold.

Currently, it is difficult to reach a balance for seniors because their bodies are more sensitive to the temperature and the current system isn’t quick enough to respond to the changing needs of the elderly room temperature. However, I think temperature equilibrium can be achieved

if the elderly have a product such as thermsovission because they can control the room themselves.

The added bonus of thermovission that it will increase the comfort of the customer by enabling him/her to also control the television with the same remote. So instead of being under a blanket in the winter or distressed because of the heat in the summer they can comfortably watch television in their homes.

Production

I have already contacted the biggest and one of the oldest EMS (electronics manufacturing services) company in the U.S, Jabil, to mass produce our devices. Jabil is headquartered in St. Petersburg FL and has over 90 plants in 23 countries, giving me the choice of choosing the site I want produce my product with the same reliability. Some sites are cheaper than others, such as sites in India and China, so I can plan ahead and save on production costs. But to save on shipping and lower length of time from production to the market, I plan to use the plants are in the US plants. at the same time, it is a benefit to work with a company with many plants around the country and the world because I can manufacture products at the closest site from where my customers lives and if I want to expand to other countries in the future, I can do so without worrying about manufacturing.

I am aiming for a production time of less than two months. My aim is to have a length of production of 3-6 six weeks. Being versatile and meeting customers’ needs as soon as possible will give me a competitive advantage against competitors that might surface. So I plane to start manufacturing with plants in the U.S. to cut costs on shipping and have a shorter time from production to the market.

My reason for working with Jabil is because of their experience. At 45 years old, Jabil has

tremendous experience of producing quality products, experience that could cut down on mistakes and delays I might face with a new manufacturing company. Jabil is behind the production of 250 best brands in the world such as apple and Disney. They can produce products at high speeds that can immediately reach the market without too much quality checking on my part. This increase our reliability to our customers. Because they have a history of manufacturing quality products, my remote will also be a quality product.

Because I will be using an EMS Company for mass production, my cost for staffing employees with the technical know-how is greatly cutlet since I will be using their staff. Jabil has over 170,0000 employees, many of whom are experts in the manufacturing of electronic devices.

The risks

Although I believe Thermovision will succeed, there are risks to investing in it. Some of these risks are, Thermovission is a narrow product with a very specific purpose product. Another risks is that there are already wireless remote controls on the market that control television and central heating and cooling systems, albeit individually, but people are already accustomed to such a system and might not see the use of Thermvision. Another risk is at 2 million dollars start up cost, Thermovission costs a bit much too produce and this will increase the retail price that might hinder customers from buying.

Legal disclaimer

Since this is only a peripheral device that enhances the functionality of the existing heating and cooling and home entertainment systems, there are no legal declaimers for its production. Since Thermovission will not be using great amounts of power that might disturb other devices such as

radio transmitters, we will not have any problems from FCC (Federal Communications Commission) either. And since we are not altering the software and hardware of the home systems, I will not have problems with them either. In fact I might even partner with them later if and when I want to add additional functionality on Thermovissions.

One of the legal issues I might face will be on the warranty if there are any faults in my devices. I will grant warranty as it will be required by law to replace or repair faulty products that are the fault of manufacturing.

The market

To go from our prototype to mass production, I will need 2 million dollars. This amount of money will produce half a million remotes. My estimate is that we will start to make profit in three years and get our investment back. Our initial target market is half a million Baby Boomer.

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Analysis of Digital Storytelling

Posted on December 27, 2017 | Leave a comment
  1. Based on class discussions, course materials and your own experience, how is gamification changing the way we live, learn, work and interact with other people? Give examples from your own life. What, in your opinion, are the positives and negatives of using games for other than entertainment purposes?

Gamification is changing the way we learn, work, and interact with others. Gamification is the use of gaming techniques such as rewards and scores to projects that are not games and not for entertainment.  By using levels, leaderboards, along with narratives as in games, gamification techniques is engaging audiences better than traditional methods of advertising, training, and maybe even education. Retaining the attention of users, whether customers, students, or employees  has become more challenging because of all the distractions new technologies are providing.  Proponents of gamification argue that gamification could be used to solve the attention deficit problem.

For many businesses, gamification techniques of levels and rewards are being used to hook and retain customers. These businesses  use the point system in the same way levels are used in games. Every dollar a customer spends, she receives a point. And after a certain amount of points, the customer receives a reward. The main aim of the  businesses is to entice the customer to feel excited to want the reward because when that happens, the customer is less likely to go to a competitor.  The other aim for businesses is to get the customer to spend more, thinking she is getting rewarded. Businesses make sure that customers can see their points (level) on their receipt. Because when customers see they are close to receiving their reward, often buy something extra, even if they don’t need it, for the sole purpose of the reward. These gaming techniques are working, because Customers do  get excited to receive their reward and they do spend more. Consumer gamification techniques are used  to entice the customer to constantly want  to level up by spending more. And this affects us all because we are all consumers.

Gamification techniques are being used in education as well. In education engaging students, stimulating their interests, and retaining their attention is the main aim. Gamification techniques such as immediate feedback are used to help students overcome obstacles  in the same way they would when playing a video game: failure is just part of the process that needs to be overcome to move on to the next level. For instance, in online education, lessons are being gamifying so that students are rewarded  and punished  based on their performance. Lessons are  being broken down into sections (levels) just as games are divided. Passing a section is overcoming an obstacle whether through a single try or several tries. And in the classroom, to better engage with students gamification techniques such as by rewards, set goals , and give feedback are being used.This form of learning allows students to truly go at their own pace, unlike  the traditional way in which lessons are often too fast or too slow for sections of the student body.

Overall , gamification techniques are  being used by just about every industry. And the reason for this is that gamification techniques being able to change  human behavior by making activities more enjoyable is incredibly powerful  for every sector: education, advertizing, or human resources. Organizations use gamification techniques  to train their employees.

the popularity of gamification techniques is due to the fact that they work. Give someone a goal and a reward and they will work harder; the reward does not even have to be equal to the effort. Overall, there are  obvious benefits to gamification but there are also obvious negatives. One negative for instance is that gamification techniques are  being used to manipulate consumers. Another negative is that in education, there is not enough evidence to prove that gamification is better for engaging with students than traditional method of engaging with students as it’s being propagated.

 

  1. How are new technologies and new media affecting the social interactions between people? How are they shaping our relationships with other people and our society in general? How do you see the future of storytelling in our society? Give examples and reasons for your opinions.

New technologies and new media are affecting the social interactions between people. They are shaping our relationships with other people and our society  and this is largely due to the way  in which they are changing storytelling. The best way people engage and interact with one another is through a story. And since the beginning  of social media sites such as bulletin boards, people have been convening online, telling stories.

With new media ,stories can be told in multiple ways, reaching the audience through multiple senses other than just sight and hearing. In new media,  narratives can be interactive, allowing the audience to partake in  them actively  in a way they wouldn’t have been able to do with traditional storytelling.  With new media, storytellers are shaping their stories to match the technology. They are using blogs, vlogs, social media sites such as facebook and twitter, google maps, infographics, and  video games (consoles or online) to convey rich narratives. In new media storytelling, users have more of a say in the narrative  than in traditional forms. In them, users can shape the story’s direction. They  can interact with one another to decide the fates of characters and plot sequence. New media allows multiple players to partake in the telling of a narrative such as in multiplayer video games. New media  is an incredibly flexible and complex way of telling stories in which creators  use different platforms and formats to tell stories using text, visuals, music, and videos to tell stories with flexible plots whose narrative structures are often non-linear, deviating from the traditional, inflexible way stories were are told.

Storytelling is changing to suit the needs of current listeners who are always on their phones instead of watching television, reading books, or  listening to the radio. This audience has no patience and in order for their attention to be retained, creators have to be more innovative. And in new media storytelling, the audience and the creators are patterners who co-create. Allowing the users to create as well, storytellers take more of a backseat. Users can decide where to start and where to end a story. In this form of storytelling, the role of the creators is to map out a flexible structure and try to remain as invisible as possible, so it doesn’t seem like  they are driving the story. The users  must feel like they are driving the plot.

The way we tell stories is changing. Everyone is a storyteller such as citizen journalism. There thousands of posts online of photographs and text, combining and adding text and photographs and videos.  And then there emerging technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality promising to change the way we tell stories forever. Our way of telling stories is changing the way in which we engage with one another. And the reason is because we no longer have to be in the same space at the same time to tell stories to one another, we can do so in virtual space. So more and more, we spend less time physically socializing and more in front of our digital screens. We not communicating less,  because  we are in fact engaging in  multi-way conversations using technology that allows use to mesh together text and visuals. And with new media, we are seamlessly stringing together infinite substories in infinite plots to interact with one another.

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Evaluating a Website

Posted on December 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

Sfpl.org is the website to The San Francisco Public Library. The site acts as a visual and textual guide for users of the twenty-seven brick and motor branches of the San Francisco Public Library system. The site is an information repertory where users can obtain information such as obtaining a library card, locations of library branches and their hours of operation, a calendar of events, exhibits, and classes, and other resources and services. In addition, the site also acts as a virtual library from which users can borrow hundreds of thousands of eBooks, newspapers articles, eMusic, and videos. And as they could do with physical books, users of the site could also return and renew their electronic materials. And lastly, the site acts as a menu in informing users the resources the physical library branches have to offer and how the residents of San Francisco can go about accessing those resources.

A quick skim through the Sfpl.org immediately reveals that one of the interesting challenges the site designers of Sfpl.org had to deal with is the site’s very diverse and varied audiences. While most sites have a tightly targeted demographic, sfpl.org has numerous. It services all the residents of the metropolis of San Francisco (men, women, kids, people of different races, people of different nationalities–some of whom are not English speakers, students, homemakers, etc.). Because of its diverse audience and the numerous services it offers, the site is designed to be viewed in English, Spanish, and Chinese, and there are separate tabs for teens and kids. Additionally, there is an advanced search option for students to search for scholarly resources.  

The purpose of this report is to judge the usability of sfpl.org, which means that it is judged primarily on how useful it is to its users—meaning how well it enables it users to navigate through it to achieve their goals. The criteria used to judge the usability of this site based on the usability heuristics by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville & Jorge Arango in their book Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. In this book, the useful principle is defined as whether there is a need for something. The learnable principle is defined as how easy is it for a user to navigate through the site, learn its numerous sections, and to be able to use it more effectively and efficiently navigate through it because they have learned how to do so from  navigating through the site. The memorable principle judges whether the users remember what they learned and can effectively apply those memories whenever they reuse the site. Lastly, the delightful criteria is used to judge whether users enjoy using the site.  Finally the effectiveness and efficiency of the site will be examined. The effectiveness judges whether the site is doing the job what it was built to do. And the efficiency judges how fast–without the waste of resources such as time—users can achieve their purposes on the site.

As a website that services so many people, appearance does not seem to be the most important goal of the creators of sfpl.org, rather usability was their top goal. Sfpl.org is built for visibility and easy navigation. In terms of appearance, the site looks drab and old fashion.  The design of the website is in the colors of light shades of blues for the top row and side columns and accompany by a light background the body where a chunks of text is located. However this boring appearance seems to suit the site, because from it looks and feel of the appearance of the, the colors represent the San Francisco public library system. Therefore, visitor of the physical library who visit the site, will feel as if they are in the physical library. The site’s design connects the website to the physical libraries.

From the incredibly large amounts of information available on the site, it is easy to see that it acts a documentation for the whole of the San Francisco public library system. The purpose for the documentation is for the users to access the information they need. The site informs users of the San Francisco Public Libraries’ resources, activities and services that are available both online and at the physical branches and what they need to access them. In total, the site has seven menu tabs. These tabs are Home, Books & Materials, eLibrary, Services, Kids, Teens, Calender, Libraries, and About. The navigation structure of sfpl.org is organized with these tabs, as all the information is categorize under these tabs and their drop-down menus. Other than the Home, Kids, and Teen tabs, all the menu tabs, have an embed drop-down menu. In addition to the tabs, there is a search tool that is very useful since there is a lot of information on the site. The search tool allows the user to filter for specific information on the website without having to look through the whole site.

From looking at and navigating through the site, it is obvious that the sequence of the placement of tabs in the menu is deliberate. The first tab is the Home tab. The Home shows that the purpose of the designers of the website is to get its users to make the decision to visit one of the twenty-seven branches of the San Francisco library system. The home tab clearly shows the main purpose of the site is to get users to go to the physical libraries. It reveals that the site’s designers think that the primary purpose of the users of the site is to find information about the physical library branches. The home tabs display information such as upcoming events at different branches, the location and hours of the main library branch and all the other twenty-seven branches, services the library provides, and spring features which highlights what’s going on in the spring season. Next to the home tab is the Books and materials tab where users can conveniently browse through the library system’s catalogue to locate what they are seeking. Finally, the third tab is the eLibrary tab. Users navigate through this tab to obtain electronic materials such as ebooks, music, videos, and other electronic sources. The location of this tab illustrates that although electronic materials are increasingly becoming popular, they are not regarded to be as important as physical materials.

Overall, Sfpl.org is well designed and accomplishes its purpose. The only problems it seems to have is that it has a lot of information and it design is boring. However, it is easy to see why the website was design the way it is. Although, it looks old fashion, it is a design that is still relevant and useful to users of the site as it is easy to the eyes and making it easy to read the site’s information. With a little more effort it could made to look both stylish and usable, however, for now it is a safe deign. Another good decision the site’s designer made is the use of redundancy. Redundancy made the site very useful. Repeating much of the information throughout the site allows users to access the same information in different sections of the site. Information such as address, hours, language options, and the services the libraries provide can be found at several areas of the site including several tabs, links at the content section of the tabs, and at global areas of the site such as the footer and header of the website.

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