Noosphere

Teilhard is the father of the noosphere. Noosphere is the "sphere of human thought." It is an anology for atmostphere and biosphere. Noosphere is anything mental. When I say it is mental it does not just mean that it is a thought. It could be a way that humans and animals communicate. In my earlier blog about Cleaveland's 7 Characteristics I mentioned that animals communicate by some form in-order to warn each other of danger or simply to tell where a food source is. Humans do similar communicating. For example, if a friend gives someone directions to where they are or where you are trying to get to they are using a "mental picture" by describing how to get to the destination.

Information Cocoons/ Filter Bubbles

An information cocoon or filter bubble is a communication universe that is chose and suites and revolves around us. Google, Yahoo, and even Facebook are information cocoons and filter bubbles. These places are the most common places people visit to interact socially or share their views about certain subjects. Since the cocoons and filters only allow us to see and hear what makes us happy, sometimes important information is left out. If information is left out when a business is having to make an executive decision, then it could either not grow or worse fall. So, information cocoons and bubble filters can be a great source or even a bad one. In 2004 the well-known government CIA was accused of group thinking. Group thinking is a force resists divergent thinking (to think something else) to accomplish one task. The CIA was found to have a predisposition missed a serious threat from Iraq which caused them to find an alternative possibilities and solutions. They forced other members of the group to confirm their decision. They rejected the information saying that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Due to their decision cost both countries over 1 million deaths.

The CIA was not the only government ran operation that has suffered from information cocoons. NASA has suffered from this information block. They disregarded the information they found out about the Columbia’s explosion which cost 7 astronaut lives.

 

Copyright and Disney

As I began to read the article Mickey Mouse vs. The People I found out a lot about the legal system with copyright. Eric Eldred and Laura Bjorklund just wanted to publish old books. Eldred had a web site that contained versions of old Nathaniel Hawthorne novels and Robert Frost poems since 1995. Bjorklund was a small Massachusetts publishing company that focused on genealogy texts and out-of-print histories. On October 27, 1998 a Disney Corp. urged President Clinton that their Mickey Mouse copyright was soon to expire. Clinton then passed a law that allowed a copyright protection to extend for another 20 years. Eldred and Bjorklund said that the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (the law that President Clinton passed) was harming the public by taking information from public domains and agreeing to allow the copyright holders to have full control. "Corporations would benefit, but small publishers and the general public, they argued, would suffer." A law professor from Harvard had heard their case and accepted it pro bono. Both Eldred and Bjorklund was the first plaintiff’s in a law suit that was trying to overturn the copyright extension. After four years of litigation, the Supreme Court said that they would hear their case on February 19, 2002. The copyright law that was passed in 1978 stating that an author’s work would be protected for 50 years after they passed away. Corporations such as Mickey Mouse were protected for an extended 20 years after The Bono Act.

Since I am wanting to major in pre-law this story is really appealing to me because it is surprising that the United States Supreme Court actually accepted the case. People that send cases to the Supreme Court are denied more than accepted.

Buy Dehydrated Water

In my group we had to look up the website http://www.buydehydratedwater.com/. We had to decide whether or not the website was a reliable website or a fake. When looking at the home page of the website it looked to be legitimate. As we looked further into the website it was easy to tell that it was a fake. The biggest red flag that popped up was when we looked at the work environment and the benefits that working for this company had. Some that didn’t really seem any different from other companies were; 3 vacation days a year, 401K program, and 2 sick days a year. On the other hand there were some benefits that seemed a little ridiculous such as; total harassment to all employees, free bathroom breaks, and free transportation to work by mule. It also gave a couple contact numbers that I decided to call to see what kind of consultant that I would get and the person that answered the phone was from a company in Chicago that had no idea what I was talking about.  This website was a good web site that really helped to pick between a really site and a fake one. I learned how do depict between the real websites and the fake ones. Now that I have learned to actually look at the website and do more research than to just look at the home page because as I learned by doing this assignment that home pages are deceiving.

Cleveland's 7 Characteristics of Information

There are seven characteristics of information; human, expandable, substitutable, compressible, diffusive, shareable, and transportable. In this blog I am going to help you better understand what these characteristics are. Starting off is human. The easiest way to remember this characteristic is that it is mental. Humans are not the only species that communicate or interact to spread information, animals do so as well to either warn that danger is close or where food sources are. The second characteristic is expandable. Information is expandable due to the fact that it keeps growing. Every year more and more information is added to either the Internet or in books. The third characteristic is substitutable. Information is substitutable because it can replace capital, labor, and even land. Robots have now taken over the jobs that once were only capable of a human. Compressible is another characteristic. If information was not compressed then it would be impossible to store it. The fifth characteristic is diffusive. There is so much information that it is hard to hold onto it. For example, Illinois Governor Blagojevich sold Obama's senate seat. The sixth characteristic is shareable. Information can be shareable numerous ways, but the most common one that people think of is communication between others. Transportable is the last characteristic. Information is easily portable. An easy way to transport information is by carrying a laptop, book, and even the mind. We learn new information every day not just by reading or seeing it on a computer, but by other people telling us information that we didn’t know.