Madeleine McCracken

September, 2019 a rock that is been set aside as a "free speech" rock as been scribbled with offensive words, and the Jewish community of the university is not having it. The rock is an iconic piece of the campus, used to honor a boy who was bullied for his shirt supporting the University of Tennessee and is often drawn on by students and student groups. This time, the rock was painted with "Jews did 9-11 Google: Dancing Isrealis".The Jewish community of the school says this is not the first tine they have been targeted on this campus, stating, We are sick and tired of University of Tennessee constantly doing nothing to address this. This happens time and time again and all the university has said is ‘this is unacceptable.'” The University Chancellor Donde Plowman wrote: ”…We condemn that hate aimed toward members of our Jewish community, and we understand that words are not enough.” Now the school has security set up near the rock, but nothing see...

A did a quick Google search for Facebook, and there it is: Fake News. 2 days ago, 1 day ago, 3 hours ago and even 20 minutes ago, articles about Facebook and Fake News pops up. I read an article on the Washington Post titled, "I fell for fake news. Here's why millions of you did too." The article showed a dramatic and honestly gut wrenching video of a commercial air plane swerving and flipping in the air. Well, the video is fake. It is computer generated video by artist Aristomenis Tsirbas. The video found itself gaining over 14 million views on Facebook. I tried to link the Facebook Video, but the link has expired...(question, did Facebook make them take the video down?) The artist posts clips of CGI on Youtube, and some clips make its way to Facebook by reposters. Many of these go viral because of shock value, and the clips are just that believable. Tsibar has worked on the "Titanic" film and "Star Trek", so his work is just insane. I mea...

I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 in my Junior year of high school. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradburry is a dystopian novel about a society that is constantly watched, monitored, controlled and censored by a government entity called "Big Brother". As a high school student who normally felt burdened by mandatory reading, I actually really enjoyed this book. It gets you thinking and really makes you question everything. The book follows a firefighter whose job is to burn books and destroy them. Guy Montag's job is to destroy any trace of literature by creating fires, not putting fires out. He meets a girl named Clarisse who makes him question his job and sees that his life is full of emptiness. Montag has to respond to an old lady who had been illegally hiding a large stash of books, and he is shocked that the old woman chooses to be burned with her books. He steals books, and realizes that his life is full of nothing and that his job does not make sense and the wor...

www. What even is that? What does that mean? Where did it come from?  These are questions I never thought of concerning the www. that comes before every website I use daily, www.netflix.com, www.youtube.com, www.gmail.com, www.blogger.com.  Those three Ws just have always been there for me, there was never a time where the three letters were not essential parts of a website URL. For goodness sake, websites, computers, the internet, email and texting have been there since I had the ability to walk! I never did any research about what the three Ws were until this year when researching for a project. WWW stands for the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Lee-Berners when he was working for CERN in 1989. CERN was the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.  He was born June 8th 1955 in London to two parents who worked on computers. From a young age, he was interested in computers. In the beginning, Lee-Berners had a fascination with tr...

"Progress comes from uncomfortable truths." Recently, I attended a speaker event from Ken Ilgunas and his book, "This Land is Our Land" and he opened it with a quote from Jeanne d'Arc that I can not seem to find anywhere. But summed up . by Ilgunas was that "progress comes from uncomfortable truths". His book is about his hike through the Keystone XL (I hope I got that right) to follow the pipelines. Constantly throughout his trip, he ran into no "trespassing signs" and "private property" everywhere. In one instance, a police officer told Ken. "He would have shot you for being on his land." 75% of America is privately owned.  The author mentioned some private property signs he saw, like a waterhole that was super nice and popular and then became private property. People would be arrested for trespassing. Mark Zuckerberg built a wall for property and people complained about it. In Martha's Vineyard ther...

Science Daily released this article on August 14, about a new app that can detect fraudulent machines on gas station pumps. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190814081214.htm Police in San Marcos show how to distinguish from skimmers at ATMs and gas pumps. https://smcorridornews.com/how-to-avoid-theft-of-card-information-at-the-atm-gas-pump/ An app has been developed by computer scientists that detects machines that will steal costumer's credit card numbers when pumping gas. These "skimmers" use Bluetooth to acquire and transmit the stolen data.  The app was developed by UC San Diego and University of Illinois using data from the US Secret Service to detect Bluetooth signals that are extracting data from users. The app can detect a skimmer in 3 seconds, while the manual checks take 30 minutes or more. Credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard are requiring pumps to use Bluetana to prevent fraud. The app is only available to la...