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Week 2: Response to “Long Live The Web” by Tim Berners-Lee and “The Strange Geopolitics of The International Cloud” by Ingrid Burrington – Xavier Juhala

Reading Long Live the Web made me realize the importance of the internet in our daily lives. Reading about the standardized and open protocols which allow the internet to function and which give it access to anyone that understands these protocols really showed the truly global nature of the internet and the immensely important role the internet now plays in fostering democracy and of our increasingly globalized world. Prior to reading this article, I had never really thought about how certain websites and companies such as Facebook, Apple and certain Google services create barriers around web connectivity by forcing you to create user accounts and making you use their own proprietary services rather than the common on HTML protocol which is open to all. By doing this the companies are creating closed off networks which as described in the article hinders connectivity and the free sharing of information and rather puts our information in the select hands of a few which in turn gives them immense power. After reading about how certain companies have also introduced things to hinder our access to certain websites that offer differing political viewpoints or that are owned by rival companies I now even more firmly believe in the need for a set of rules such as the ones put in place under President Obama which established Net Neutrality as the law of the land in the USA and which protected internet users from predatory practices from internet services providers. It is a shame that the current US administration removed these rules under the guise of a “free market” as this decision will only further serve to erode American democracy. 

The article “The strange geopolitics of The international Cloud” I think goes hand in hand with this other article because it goes hand in hand with the problems of the internet today and the use and storage of user data which is extremely valuable information. Who owns the data stored in the data centers of certain countries is an extremely important question as the answer could lead to certain companies or governments having access to potentially sensitive information about its users and its citizens. In our globalized world, this becomes an increasingly important question and one which regulations should be put in place immediately to protect users from predatory practices by governments and corporations alike. The GDPR adopted by the European Union is a great example of regulation which could be adopted in order to protect user data and other countries which seek to preserve the freedoms and privacy of its citizens, in my opinion, should immediately adopt similar regulations.  

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Week 2: Response to “Long Live The Web” by Tim Berners-Lee and “The Strange Geopolitics of The International Cloud” by Ingrid Burrington – Chloe Chan

In contrast to the innumerable articles critiquing the rise of technology “Long Live The Web” by Tim Berners-Lee encourages its development stating simply that the internet will continue to be a fascinating resource which allows individuals in the world to have access to a variety of opportunities such as staying connected with public information or to accomplish scientific breakthroughs. Berners-Lee remains unshakably firm on his idea that the ‘Fundamental Principles of the Web’ must be maintained in order for the technology, and all of its resources to continue to flourish alongside human civilization. He appraises the commercialisation of the internet as in doing so, the accessibility to data, information is lost. It becomes more difficult to share knowledge on one open platform, it instead belongs to one gated community. The internet has become increasingly commodified which violates many of the fundamental principles that Berners-Lee discusses. He emphasizes the loss of internet privacy as social media platforms retain their user’s personal information to use for advertising and the monopolisation of search engines and browsers. The increased commodification of the internet limits innovation, and the ability for the internet to become this powerful resource that can lead to scientific breakthroughs because the web slowly becomes a resource that isn’t free to use. You have to sacrifice personal information, or join a group, give up precious time to watch an ad in order to access these platforms. 

Berner-Lee’s discussion of internet privacy pairs quite nicely with Ingrid Burrington’s discussion of Internet Soverignity in her article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud”. The conversation around internet sovereignty still continues and multiple conflicts over the localised access to data still continue. Many companies have situated their data centres outside of the countries that they are operating in due to the climate and economic factors, this, however, makes it difficult for companies to access data of foreign users if internet sovereignty is enforced. Internet sovereignty discusses in this article can be compared to the walled fences that Berner-Lee discusses in his articles claiming that they will become a backwards force on the full potential on the internet. He believes that “if a walled garden has too tight ahold on a market [it] can delay that outside growth”. Berner-Lee believes that with these restrictions on data and information, we are no longer able to make a combined worldwide effort into furthering research and improving services that will make the access to the web a more streamlined service. 

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Week 1: HTML Portfolio Website – Adam Chou

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ac6596/HTML_Project/

Reflection:

To be completely honest, I was taken aback when I was initially given this project. The code was run through at an abrasive pace, where I struggled to copy down (line by line) the code that I thought would build my project. Because of the speed of such a process, to think that i could learn to code, even the basics, was hard to think. However, by experimenting in the workshop sessions, I quickly realized how simple and reusable many of the commands were. Because of this, I felt that I was well equipped (once I understood the functions) to do a little more than what was asked for. Within the limited requirements, I believe that I did this and I hope that any viewer of my project is similarly surprised. I will admit though, I doubt anyone will be surprised due to the simple goals of the project. 

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Bio | Week 1 | Lab Report: Cellular Automaton(Terrence Tu)

      As far as we learned from the class, we were still talking about cellular automaton below two dimensions. Conway’s Life of Game is a kind of two-dimensional cellular automation while Wolfram’s “The Crucial Experiment” of A New Kind of Science is doing one-dimensional cellular automaton and representing the its behavior in two-dimensional graph. From both of the cases, we can that significant complexity occurs from very simple programs.

      From my perspective, however, considering of the three-dimensional space we are living in, I am more curious about feasibility, meaning and possible applications of the cellular automation in three dimensions.

      In Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, he actually discussed about the cellular automation in higher dimension in the chapter “Two Dimensions and Beyond“. As he said, “Indeed, despite what we might expect from traditional science, adding more dimensions does not ultimately seem to have much effect on the occurrence of behavior of any significant complexity”. It is expected to see that complexity will still happen when running the cellular automaton in three dimensions.

 

(Two examples of three-dimensional cellular automaton, Given in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science)

     After further research, I found out some three-dimensional Game of Life. First we need to introduce a new naming method of  Game of Life.

      As we known, Conway’s Game of Life only has two  rules, one defines when to survive or die. The other one defines when to come alive. According to that, we can use a 4-tuple to define different Game of Life of different rules. Life ABCD means that (1) an alive cell survives when it touches at least A, at most B cell, it survive, otherwise it dies.(2) a dead cell comes to alive when it touches down to C, up to D cell. In this case, Conway’s Game of Life can be define as Life 2333.

      Carter Bays, in his paper “Candidates for the Game of Life in Three Dimensions”, defined that the naming method can only be used when following are True:

1.A glider must exist and must occur “naturally” if we apply repeatedly to primordial soup configurations.
2.All primordial soup configurations, when subjected to, must exhibit bounded growth.

      Carter Bays suggested that Life 4555 and Life 5766 are two best “worthy of the name” three-dimensional Game of Life. Thus, I turned to searched for some codes to test these two type of Life.

       3DGameofLife on GitHub is a JavaScript program created by Raphael Beaulieu and Elliot Coy. It can test three-dimensional Game of Life in a bounded space of 20×20×20. The complete code can be seen when we check the source code of the page, thus I am not going to paste it here. 

      First, going to test Life 4555. When I began the game with 7 cells of a 3D cross shape, The game showed a pattern of blinker. It stably iterates between three shape. 

      Then, going to run Life 4555 again. This time, I began the game with 12 cells with the following shape.

      This time, even with the same rules, cells shows a totally different pattern. The number of cells explodes in a very short of time.

       Still, running Life 4555, with 5 cells of 2D cross shape. It turned out to be a third pattern. The cross repeatedly produced itself on the both way of the same line.

      Finally, testing the rule 5677. It showed a pattern of glider. The glider moved diagonally in one plane. However, it is worth to mention that the plane is parallel with one axis and  perpendicular to the other two axis, which means that the moving of the glider is kind of restricted.

Interestingly we can see that even under same rules, the outcomes will be significantly different because of the different input parameters, even when the differences between the input parameters are quite little. From my view, it is pretty similar to the beginning of life. Even there are planets other than Earth offer exactly same condition on Earth,  Our planets may be the only one holds the promise of life. 

Also, I find out that all the patterns under three-dimensional Game of Life I achieve above can actually acquired in the two-dimensional Game of Life. To some extend, it proves Bays’ saying “adding more dimensions does not ultimately seem to have much effect on the occurrence of behavior of any significant complexity”. However, since two-dimensional space is not visible, is that possible for two-dimensional creatures that we cannot  see existed as dimension seems not to be an important factors of complexity. That will be a left question for me.

Cite:

Candidates for the Game of Life in Three Dimensions’, Complex Systems, Carter Bays, Columbia, SC 29208, USA,

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c865/e0d19f53ba646e076d6e542e1002c92fd3ad.pdf

Wolfram, Stephen. “Two Dimensions and Beyond”, A New Kind of Science, 1959, Wolfram Media

https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/chap-5–two-dimensions-and-beyond/

3DGameofLife, Raphael Beaulieu, Elliot Coy

http://rbeaulieu.github.io/3DGameOfLife/3DGameOfLife.html?

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NOC – Week 1: sketch – Yunyu Zhang(Samantha)

I decided to use function draw() to create automatically updated colorful bubbles using p5. 

  1. I first used the random() function to create bubbles that appear in random positions on the screen with random colors.
  2. I also want to make the bubbles appear randomly in different sizes within a certain range.
  3. I found that the bubbles would be circles or ellipses randomly. But I want them to be circles in different sizes. So I used “let” to assign x with a certain range of numbers and put x in ellipse().
  4. I also want the bubbles to be a little bit transparent. I looked up in p5 and learned about alpha that controls the opacity of colors.
  5. I adjusted the size of the bubbles to make them smaller like little dots and used “windowWidth” and “WindowHeight”so that the effect looks better.