Week 3 and The Treasure Hunt

Week three content was a discussion on as well as a short history of computing and the internet. The content looked at computing in depth as well as the internet and it's functions. I was interested to see that computers all began with simple adding machines. It also stated that IBM first commercially introduced computers in the 1950's. It then described how the different large computing companies (IBM Apple ect) started and slowly evolved. This was all information that I was previously unaware of. Also of note was the creation of the internet and how it works. It was interesting to know that the RAND corperation originally came up with the idea.


 1. What is the weight of the world's biggest machine? How much did it cost to build?


First up I had to search for the world's biggest machine and seeing as it was just announced in class I came to the conclusion that it was the Hadron Collider. Still I don't know how much the massive thing costs so I will use Yahoo to search it out. I decided to use the first site the engine gave me as it seemed pretty literal.

http://www.hadron.com.au/ (Accessed 11th August 2010)

According to this site the estimated cost of the machine was 64 billion Euro's.

Which according to

http://auspost.com.au/travelmoney/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Travel_Money (11th August, 2010)...actually wait that site sucks

http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html (11th August, 2010)

Is about 92.5 Billion Australian dollars. Here is a picture for your viewing pleasure

 (Picture From http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/15/large_hadron_collider_cern_2.jpg)

2.What is the best way (quickest, most reliable) to contact Ozzy Osborne?
Okay so I thought my celebrity stalking days were over but apparently every time I think I am out something pulls me back in.

Well that was disturbingly easy but apparently the website
http://famous-relationships.topsynergy.com/Ozzy_Osbourne/Contact.asp (11th August 2010)
Says that he can be contacted through his  agent Sharon Osborn and her phone number given was 310-859-7761which is an American number. I don't really know how reliable this all is but honestly how many academic sources will tell me how to stalk celebrities anyways.

3. When and what  was the first example of global digital communication.

First of all to answer this question I decided to get a defintion of the word digital to make sure I could find the right subject. Using the yahoo search engine I typed 'Digital dictionary' and a few sites came up which took things too literally and actually gave me digitised dictionaries but eventually I came to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/digital (2nd September 2010) the useful definitions came out to basically

An audio method of recording in which flutter is reduced and backround noise is reduced.

With this is mind I was told by the website (whihc I found by typing history of digital communication into yahoo)  http://www.scribd.com/doc/35872793/Why-Digital (accessed 2nd September 2010)  that the telegraph was the first  form of large scale digital communication to find out when it was used globally I typed 'global telegraph'into yahoo and found that the first instance of electomagentic global telegraphing started in about 1865 telegraph messages went global thanks to submarine cables. This was thanks to the website http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?/catapult/indepth/telegraph.htm (accessed 2nd September 2010)

 4. What is the cheapest form of travel from the Gold Coast to Melbourne?
This one seemed like less of a challenge and I decided to go the easy route by typing 'cheap flights gold caost melbourne' into yahoo.

aftter finding the site http://www.webjet.com.au/flights/business-melbourne/gold-coast/ (Accessed september 2nd 2010)  I realised that I was getting nowhere here and had to look elsewere.

The website http://flightstomelbourne.net.au/flights/domestic/OOL/Gold-Coast/to/MLB/Melbourne-All-Airports was alot more helpful and I was able to find that I could get a flight from gold coast to melbourne on a number of flight services for only $59.

5. Who is Hatsune Miku? What company does she belong to? What is her Birthday?

This was a little confusing as I had  never heard of Hatsune Miku and was under the impression she would be a real person...

... So naturally I was a little surprised to see an anime character come up instead. Just by looking at some of the sites availalbe it came to my attention that she was a virtual music idol. I eventaully came to a 'fansite' called http://www.mikufan.com/ (Accessed September 2nd 2010) according to the site she was developed by Crypton media.

I just typed Hatsune Miku birthday into yahoo to get her birthdate which was the 31st of August according to the website http://anime-baka.blogspot.com/2008/08/happy-birthday-hatsune-miku.html (accessed 2nd September 2010)

6. Find a live Webcam in Antartica. Find a place to stay in antartica.

Well I hoped this one would be quite straightfoward and so I optimistically typed 'Antartica Webcam' into yahoo and hoped for a good result.
And I got the result I needed from the website http://www.antarctica.gov.au/webcams/mawson (accessed 2nd September 2010) which showed webcam footage from Mawson Station in Antartica and the live webcame would update pictures every ten minutes.

All I could find that was even close to a place to stay in Antarctica were the cruises that travel through the forzen land.  Hapag-LLoyd Cruises came up on the website http://www.travel-antarctica.com/ (Accessed 2nd September 2010) with large cruises being banned from Antartica in 2011 this seems like the best choice as they will not be effected.

7. What song was top of the Australian pop charts this week in 1980?

Having little knowledge of the 80's music scene I would definetely have to check this on out on reliable old yahoo. I typed in 'Australian music charts September 1980  to see what would come up. Very little did... So I decided to take some advice from ask.com...after a long time of searching I finally found (http://80music.about.com/od/80smusic12/tp/topsongsof1980.htm, accessed 2nd September 2010) that the Blondie song 'Call Me' Was the number one song for all of 1980 and that is the best I could do.

8. How would you define the term 'nano technology'? In your own words, what does it really mean?

Nano technology has always seemed to me like it would mean say tiny robots ect so to define the term myself I decided to look of the definition of the term 'nano' on yahoo.com

The website http://www.mondofacto.com/facts/dictionary?nano- (accessed 2nd September 2010) gave definitions stating nano meant "Something small" or as a prefix meaning one-billionth. So basically I would assume that nano-technology would be exteremely tiny tiny pices of technology and to make sure I checked by typing nano-technology into my trusty search engine to see what would come up. The website http://www.answers.com/topic/nanotechnology (Accessed 2nd September 2010) gave a definition basically stating that nano-technology was technology that was created from atoms and molecules.

9. What sort of camera is used for google street-view?

I don't really look at google street view so I had absolutely no idea how it worked or what kind of camera was used  so...yahoo will come in handy once again.  The camera used  for google street view is the IMC or Immersive Media Camera. It is mounted on cars and sent around the streets. Here is a photo. from the site I got the info http://google.about.com/od/experimentalgoogletools/ig/SIGGRAPH-2007/Immersive-Media-Camera.htm (Accessed 2nd September 2010)

Question 10. Translate these questions into Klingon.

Well it wouldn't be a series of questions unless I got to translate them into to klingon...hmmmm Yahoo Klingon translator I think.

http://www.mrklingon.org/ (Accessed September 2nd 2010) Had a very sophisticated Klingon translater so let's go

Question 1:What is the weight of the world's biggest machine? How much did it cost to build?
[Question] nuq 'oH [the] [weight] vo' [the] qo' [biggest] [machine] chay' 'ar ta'ta' 'oH [cost] Daq chen

Question 2: What is the best way (quickest, most reliable) to contact Ozzy Osborne?

[Question] nuq 'oH [the] [best] [way] [quickest] HochHom [reliable] Daq [contact] [Ozzy] [Osborne]

Question 3: When and what was the first example of global digital communication.
[Question] ghorgh 'ej nuq ghaHta' [the] wa'DIch [example] vo' [global] [digital] [communication]

Question 4: What is the cheapest form of travel from the Gold Coast to Melbourne?
[Question] nuq 'oH [the] [cheapest] [form] vo' [travel] vo' [the] SuD baS [Coast] Daq [Melbourne]

Question 5: Who is Hatsune Miku? What company does she belong to? What is her Birthday?
[Question] 'Iv 'oH [Hatsune] [Miku] nuq [company] ta'taH ghaH [belong] Daq nuq 'oH Daj qoS

Question 6: Find a live Webcam in Antartica. Find a place to stay in antartica.
[Question] tu' [a] yIn [Webcam] Daq [Antartica] tu' [a] Daq Daq [stay] Daq [antartica]

Question 7. What song was top of the Australian pop charts this week in 1980?
[Question] nuq bom ghaHta' [top] vo' [the] [Australian] [pop] [charts] vam [week] Daq

Question 8: How would you define the term 'nano technology'? In your own words, what does it really mean?
[Question] chay' [would] SoH [define] [the] [term] ['nano] [technology'] Daq lIj ghaj mu'mey nuq ta'taH 'oH [really] [mean]

Question 9: What sort of camera is used for google street-view?
[Question] nuq [sort] vo' [camera] 'oH [used] vaD [google] [street-view]

And there we have it...it's a wonder why this language hasn't taken off in mainstream society....

Also we needed to find three devices that were digital but not electronic. And in the tutorial we all put our minds together and decided one

1.Musical instruments.
2.The chinese Abacus (A calculator which uses beads.)
3.A sun dial (A clock which tells the time via it's shadow.

Week 2: This Years Box Office Smash!

The second week of content we looked at the language of the cinema. We looked at and leanred the different shots and shot sizes to help with our tute task in which we would create a still movie. I already knew most of the shot sizes but the connection with the "who, what, when ,where ect" was very interesting and quite helpful.

<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4kGsXg0yjjg&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4kGsXg0yjjg&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

This was a pretty awesome little project and by my count the second you tube video staring myself. I have a feeling I will become an internet sensation any day soon. But honestly it was enjoyable and we tried to vary the shots a fair bit. Mostly we were happy with how well the narrative came together considering we came up with the idea in about 5 minutes. towards the end you can see we started experimenting with the shots a little bit and we think it came off well. So yeah overall I liked the little still movie we came up with considering the time and budget (An i-phone) we had available.

First Ever post

So uh hey my name is Fin I'm 18 and am currently doing a bachelor of arts at Griffith university. I am yet to pick a major and while I was originally planning on journalism I am now not so sure. This is pretty much the first time I have even thought about writing a blog but it seems like it shouldn't be too much trouble and plus I have some pretty damn interesting thoughts at time.


Anyways New communications seems like it'll be a fun subject and this tutespark is really much  easier to work with than the other stuff so yeah that's good. It's nice to have all the information we need at one spot and the gmail account is a lot easier to go through than looking through learning@griffith.

The first week the lecture content discussed the overall definitions of numerous themes that we would look at in the subject like communication and technology. We also discussed the different forms of old and new technologies and how they differed. Naturally this first week was fairly basic and just an introduction though it did give a more interesting and in depth view of communication tech.