My Website

You can find my website at http://www.cs.trinit.edu/~nlyford.

Building the website came with some challenges, one was simply understanding how to use the software. Also choosing which program to use was difficult, both offered good and bad things. I found Seamonkey more user friendly and easy to use but Dreamweaver offered more options and I thought made the website look better. Not knowing a lot of the tools was hard to surpass, a lot of the time when I wanted to change something, I wouldn't know how and would have to look it up. Im happy with how the website turned out in the end, I think it has good information and looks somewhat professional.

Advice for future students

Be sure to take the class seriously, there is a tendency to think you already know everything you are learning. This is true for a lot of things covered but I learned things about programs that I thought I knew. Also, be sure to watch the Lynda.com videos, they are very helpful and informational. They are a great tool to have when you are confused on any topic, I know I will be using them whenever I get lost.

Good Luck!

PowerPoint Presentations

The subject of my PPT presentation was "Puppy Fashion." I really enjoyed making the PPT because it evolved a lot of my own photos. I learned a lot about animations because I was only given four slides for the entire PPT. I wish i had understood more about how to add videos into my PPT because my videos ended up not working while presenting. One of the only frustrating parts about my PPT was how long some of the transitions were, I didn't realize how long some of them were, it left some awkward pauses in my PPT. I really enjoyed Jake's presentation because it was very interactive and funny. His presentation kept the audience interested while still making a good point. His use of the PPT as well as personal presentation was great. I also enjoyed Meredith's presentation, her's was funny and topical. The transitions between slides were impressive and she had a good use of videos.  

Pics That Lie

I chose a picture of a light house and the coast, I chose this picture because of the potential devastating impact of environmental change would have on the coast. I found the image on Google images after searching "lighthouse." I edited the photo in a few ways, the most obvious is the removal of color from the sea and the changing of the hue of the sky. I changed these to give the photo an apocalyptic feel and dramatize the effect that environmental change can have. Another change was the liquefying of the lighthouse, I did this to give the feel of a candle burning. I then added a wick and flame, this again emphasizes the candle feel, showing that time is running out to change our ways. I don't think the manipulation really harms the photo, instead the manipulation adds more meaning to the photo. The article I researched was about the detection of manipulated photos. The article discussed a program developed by the former vice president of product management, this program can immediately detect if a photo has been manipulated. The article only related to my  photo because my photo was edited, however I found the article interesting because of the link between the former vice president and his new line of work. I ended up choosing this article because most people are unaware of how many photos that they see are edited. Although I think that most photos that are edited are done so to emphasize the effect of the photo, its still reasonable for people to understand what they are looking at, and that that photo may not be completely "real."

Fourandsix Technologies, Inc. Fourandsix Unites Photoshop Team Veteran with Renowned Dartmouth Scientist to Fight Photo Fakery. Business Wire (English). 09/18/2012.

Chris Nolan Presentation

Chris Nolan is the Assistant University Librarian. He came to our class to inform us on many of our favorite search engines, and specifically, Google. Mister Nolan gave the statistic that an astounding, 66.4% of internet users primarily use Google as their search engine of choice. Google brings in an astounding 40 billion dollars a year as a company, 90% of that revenue comes from ads alone. Despite its popularity, it turns out that not everything exists on Google, the search engine doesn't have access to all databases, so just because something can't be found on Google, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In a surprising revelation we learned that each users individual search results go through what can be called a "filter bubble." Essentially the "filter bubble" has remembered other items that you have been interested in and shows you results that it thinks are going to to interest you. Google has a very complex algorithm to give you the results that end up appearing on the screen, and sometimes doesn't work perfectly, for example, scholarly items are listed later which might give the impression that they might not exist. Chris showed us a really interesting video on the search bubble we encounter everyday, the link is http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html.

PowerPoint

When I think back to the worst presentations I have been forced to sit through. Everyone one of them had PowerPoint in common. There is almost no way to make PPT presentations interesting. By far the worst thing about PPT is that when people present using it, they usually have made little to know preparations on what they will say in their presentation and instead rely on the PowerPoint to do the work for them. Probably 90% of PPT presentations feature the presenter reading their slides to the audience. Often presenters insist on putting way to much information in each slide, the slides are meant to show bullet points, not essays. My AP US GOV teacher was a huge fan of PPT, everyday we did the same thing, sit down, turn off the lights and look at slides. Needless to say, there was a large amount of sleeping in that class. I'm sure there are some people that can use PPT effectively, I am yet to meet them, overall I wholeheartedly believe PPT to be the most useless and least interesting tool for presenting.

True Lies

Ms. Salvo makes some very valid arguments about photo manipulation and how image editing software has changed how much people can really trust what they are seeing. Her argument about the tulip field is an interesting contradiction to how most people view image editing. When I personally think of photo editing I image someone using Photoshop to literally change what is seen. However, her tulip argument is that just by changing what the beholder focuses on, the photo has been edited. This is an interesting thought because by just changing the focus, the photos impact is completely changed. I find ethics in general to be an almost impossible subject to address since they can be different for every person. I have mixed feelings regarding photo manipulation, it does seem dishonest to edit a photo but at the same time if a photographer wants to give a photo a "feel" that the true image just doesn't show, than I understand how editing the photo is useful.