The Church's Use of Technology

After reading the article by Kathleen Lubeck in the Ensign, I was a little unimpressed by the information presented until I realized that it was published in June 1984. It is comforting to me that technology savvy members of the church have always been ready and willing to share the newest technological advances with other members of the church (or work for the church) to further the work of the Lord. An example of this is the FamilySearch project, which is using cutting edge research and technology to allow for easier genealogical research.

I feel that in general, people should be willing to help others; in the field of Computer Science, this could mean contributing to open source projects or developing applications to otherwise make lives simpler. I am a strong proponent of open source projects because it completely removes one of the prime motivators from the project (i.e. greed). Without greed, there is less reason to try to produce something mediocre just for the paycheck.

Facebook's guinea pigs

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/02/technology/social/facebook-experiment/index.html

Facebook has apparently acknowledged the error of their ways, as far as experimenting on us goes, after facing such an uproar about the breach of privacy and user trust their experiments caused. I'm not sure how I feel about these experiments; I feel that an A/B test would probably be okay, as long as the user agrees to it. I personally am a web administrator (and architect) for a website, and one of the site's main goals is to give users what they want. Therefore, I think any experiments should be opt-in instead of opt-out. At the same time, I feel that a website's owners can definitely monitor the endpoints that are being used on the server, but not the information that is sent across, nor to where it goes, without express permission from the user.

Genealogy and Genetic Diseases

I have seen and heard some claims recently about family history being used in genetic counseling as far back as the 1600s. To those who are unfamiliar, genetic counseling is the use of a family history to track genetic diseases in a family for early detection and treatment, as well as family planning. I find it interesting that it is possible to track these diseases back as far as a pilgrim ancestor to the United States, for example, and I wonder how easy it is to determine whether or not ancestor x actually had the genetic disorder in question. I also wonder at the accuracy of determining someone's cause of death that far back. Without some real evidence, I shouldn't trust the claims, but it is definitely interesting to think about.

Shellshock

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/shellshock-computer-bug-already-exploited-by-hackers-1.2777514

Something I found interesting about "shellshock" (though I prefer "bash bug," as there are more shells than bash, and as far as I can tell, the flaw only effects bash) is that there doesn't seem to be a patch yet, although the article does mention a fix. The problem is that there aren't enough details in the article (or in any security related article) to determine the present state of the bug. As far as I can tell, the difficulty with this bug is that there must be a software release to fix the issue, but there are so many system administrators who don't patch and update on a regular basis, leaving a plethora of systems wide open to attack. As someone who has worked with bash for a long time, I feel like the details that I've been able to find haven't really told me whether or not my own systems have been compromised. I've never used environment variables (the setting of which is exploitable) in my servers (as far as I know), so I don't think I'm vulnerable, but more details would help.

Apple's iPhone 6 Release

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140922005316/en/Weekend-iPhone-Sales-Top-10-Million-Set?smid=tw-nytimesbits#.VCDaAPldWJK

The article posted comments on the record-setting release of the iPhone 6. Most interesting to me is the explicit bias in the article. The author fawns over Apple technology as though compensated for the article by the resurrected Jobs himself. The article asserts that the iPhone 6 and the iPhone Plus are the "biggest advancements in iPhone history" with "innovative technologies." That said, the detractors of the iPhone claim that it is behind the times, and that Apple's "innovative" features have existed in Android phones for a long time. Yet despite the other options that exist and the features that are actually innovative in them, Apple sold more of the iPhone 6 than any previous model in its first weekend. I have many friends that have purchased the newest model, and in a survey, most of them said that their purchase of the iPhone is not a result of a superior product, but a result of a desire to purchase the brand. Why is it that we sacrifice technological advancement to be associated in some minuscule way with a company that seems to be "in?"

Orders of Ignorance

In reading some of Phillip G. Armour's Orders of Ignorance, I had a couple of thoughts. He describes in the beginning the process of development as an acquiring of knowledge. He also states that unknowledge gained is not necessarily unimportant; he quotes Edison as saying something along the lines of, and I paraphrase, "Mistakes show us how not to do something, which is just as important." I think this is a very important point, and it leads to one of my main thoughts. One of Armour's questions that he raises multiple times is, if we've done something before, why are we doing it again? An answer I propose is what is known as a pattern in software, where we are required to do something very similar, but not the same, as what we've done before. If we've made mistakes before, we already know how not to build the new product, and by process of elimination, we know what will probably work. This cuts our development time drastically.

Is Technology Divine?

Neil Postman fifth and final point in his talk "Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change" is that technology tends to become "mythic," or accepted by the public as a God-given truth. His example is that, if he were to suggest changes to television programming, people would react as though he had suggested that we change when the sun rises. The culmination of this point, at least in my understanding, was the comment that "technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris." This conflicts with Brigham Young's statement that "Every discovery in science and art, that is really true and useful to mankind, has been given by direct revelation from God." I feel that God has definitely directed our development technologically for His purposes, if for no other reason than that He created us and gave us our intelligence in the first place.