Computers

Larry Hechler came to class today and taught us a thing or two about building computers and doing computer repair and what not.  He made a point of telling us to back up our data on our computers.  If a hard drive crashes it probably is gone. I have kind of been backing up my photos but I really should do more. He backs up roughly every week.  I think I am going to buy an external hard drive. I have been meaning to.  Larry Hechler has been here aound 30 years.  Delll offers a thing called complete care. If anything happens to the laptop Dell will repair or replace it for free. Do not use alcohol ammonia or acetone to clean computers.  A lint free cloth and a bit of water or if that doesn't work a mild detergent are the only safe ways to clean.  The laptop pieces he passed around and we got to look at were very interesting.  I had never seen the individual pieces up close.  He also explained in detail why it is important to to keep your laptop on a flat surface so that the cooling fan can suck in air.  The stuff he said on the battery was interesting as well.  I had always wondered if I should let the battery run all the way down and apparently thats the best thing to do so that the battery doesn't shorten its life.  I just replaced the battery in my macbook this summer actually.  Maybe this new one will last me longer now. I did not know that laptop hard drives are generally interchangable.  Overall this was a very informative talk.

Photos That Lie

I chose for this project to combine two pictures.  I took the picture of the deer at a ranch in South Texas last winter and the picture of the crazy looking fish I used for the head I took probably about 5 years ago down at the coast.  I basically edited the fish's picture so that only the head was left.  I used the magic extractor tool to take the fish out of its picture. Then I had to remove a hook that was sticking out of the corner of its mouth and the ends of a pair of pliers my brother was using to hold the fish when I took the picture. I then decided just how much of the fish's head I want to use and erased the rest of the body.  It was pretty easy because this particular species of fish has this strange almost armor looking plate over its head and the rest of the body is smooth.  I simply deleted the smooth body and was left with the hard armored head.  I decided to leave a couple fins sticking off the head so that they would look like little fin-beards under the deer-fish's head.  I then used the move tool to move the fish's head on to the background of the deer.  I rotated the fish so that it lined up correctly with the antlers and the ears.  I then decided to move the fish's eye down to a more natural looking position so I selected just the eye and moved it down a bit.  I then used the cloning stamp to carry some of the deer's fur down over the fish's head to smooth out the lines between the image and make it look continuous.  Then I had to go in and adjust the saturation, hue, brightness, contrast and shadows of the fishes image to match that of the deer. It was tricky because the image of the fish was taken on a bright summer day and there was a lot of shine off of the fish's head and the deer's picture was taken on an overcast winters day and was much duller.  Luckily the color of the fish and the deer were close enough that it didn't take much adjustment to match them up.  
I manipulated this image this way simply because I thought it would be comical and strange looking.  I don't think this manipulation was harmful at all, just good clean fun.  Im never going to try to pass this new creature off as anything real or try to convince someone the image is unaltered.  The article I read was an interesting one about studying cells from pictures that have been altered.  Sometimes scientists will edit images of cells either intentionally or otherwise to make them easier to see or differentiate.  Often times these scientist do not consider what they may be changing when they do what they think is an improvement.  Changing the saturation or something or an image of a cell may detract from the accuracy of any observations garnered from looking at the photo.  Of course you would never want to studying something biological by looking at a photo edited in the way that mine is but there are certain things that can be done to make important things easier for scientists to see.  They just have to be careful that the manipulation doesn't have any unintended consequences and that anyone else who looks at the photo later knows how and why it has been altered so that they don't see something in it that isn't really there.  


Pinco, Jeffery, et al. "Impact of Digital Image Manipulation in Cytology." Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine 133.1 (2009): 57-61. Print.

Powerpoint Presentations

Overall I was rather satisfied with my presentation.  I felt it went well and that it was reasonably organized and neat looking. I liked the background that I found. I felt that the kind of flowing blue lines went well with the topic of rivers and discharge and what not.  My only real qualm with my presentation was I think it may have been kind of boring.  It was over a reasonably narrow subject that few people ever really need to know about.  It was kind of technical as well and not exactly an add for becoming a G Sci major, unless of course the technically stuff is what interests you.  It wasn't exactly a flashy presentation.  It was really more academic. I think the most interesting thing I got out of this was really seeing how you might go about teaching this stuff. Making the powerpoint I was continually trying to think of the best way to build on each topic so that you had to understand the first slide to really get the next.  I know I didn't really have time to teach the stuff properly nor do I think that anyone in the room cared or wanted me to but it helped me really master the equations and concepts that I was talking about.

Chris Nolan

First and foremost I did not know that google had all of those features.  The basics of image searches and web searches I knew of course but I had never heard of the google scholar function or the define function.  Apparently you can refine your searches to sources that have been deemed scholarly.  Also you can simply type in define then a : and the word and google will give you a definition.  I will definitely be using google instead of dictionary.com after what he told us about the cookies and what not that website installs on your computer.  I also found the lesson in refining your search by using the advanced search feature very helpful.  I like it that you can search only .edu's or .org's

Powerpoint

Although powerpoint is an incredibly useful tool it does have some rather annoying features.  Most of these annoyances stem from people just taking the features over board.  I would not really say that anything about the program or how it functions is particualrly annoy though my experience is not extensive enough to really say that with any authority.  That being said some annoying things include when people using the typewriter effect where the text of every word comes in individually and it uses that loud typewriter tapping noise.  Also excessive use of entry animations from every which way is rather annoying like when every word or the bullet points all fly in from a different direction.  Its cute and what not but really distracts from a good presentation.  Icluding too much information on a a slide also detracts from a presetations effectivness.  Power point slides really should provide bullet notes or a kind of outline of the presentation with perhaps very important details written out so noe one misses them.  This one may just be me but I like to see all the information on the slide at once.  I dont like it when professors go bullet by bullet only showing the next point when they have finished the last.  I understand that it helps focus on the topic at hand but I just like to see the direction a lecture is going and kind of anticipate the next topic.  Finally pictures are great in a power point slide but organization is essential. I am of the opinion that simple is good when it comes to powerpoint.  Lots of different pictures on one slide can make it very difficult to understand or follow. In the end if used effectivly and kept rather simple and elegant power point is really an essential tool in education and just the general presentation of information. It certainly beats using an overhead projector like teachers used to years ago.

CLT

I had been down to the CLT before to watch movies for my Spanish classes but I did not know the extent of the services available down there. I do find it a bit difficult to navigate down there. For some reason I get really turned around as soon as I step off those stairs. Interestingly though in my wandering around trying to get out the other day I stumbled upon a rather extensive collection of Jazz and Classical albums that were pretty cool. Anyway the computing capability down there is rather impressive. I like that they not only have several very nice PCs but also a fleet of cool Macs as well. The number of scanners is nice too. I have a scanner on my printer in my room but 1) I never hook up my printer and 2) that scanner is hard to use. Its difficult to center the thing your trying to scan and to get it to scan exactly what you want it to at the proper size. The scanners down in the CLT were very easy to use and produced exaclty what I wanted them to without any hassel. On top of all this I thought that the video conference room was quite cool as well. All those HD tvs and cameras in there would produce a fine video conferencing experience im sure. Its cool that we have access to those services should we ever need to have a video conference job interview. Im not sure I quite understood the whole Trinity network video chat system, something about it being like skype, but it sounded cool. It would be really cool if Trinity could provide lectures over this system. Not so much like classes over the internet but lectures from distinguished proffesors at other schools that we could watch instead of just the few that come to speak here on campus.

Image Manipulation

I chose this image that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 2003 because it really frustrates me when news organizations spin news and images to make them more profitable or interesting.  To be fair The LA times did not know this photo was doctored when they published it and subsequently fired the photographer but the idea is still there.  The photographer compiled an image of a British soldier and some Iraqi civilians to create this one image.  This manipulation was of course harmful.  These organizations have a job to report the truth and this image is not the truth.  All too often these days news organizations create substance to make their product more marketable.  They all do it but I can think of instances in which Fox news in particular has used stock footage of a rally to depict something that was supposed to have happened that day.

I chose this video because it describes how two images can be combined into something that looks like originally one image. This example of putting Natalie Portman's face into a painting is innocent of course.  This video is just informative in nature, not any kind of commentary on the good and bad of image manipulation.  It is valuable though to see just how easy image manipulation can be and that we should be wary when looking at images that seem implausible or just a bit off.