Blog 3

I did the article “Apple manufacturing plant workers complain of long hours, militant culture”. The article talks about a female worker name Chen describing the working conditions in China. They work in long assembly lines for many hours. Pay is very minimal and the working conditions are poor. She works for Foxconn which is a factory that works with Apple. They are the one of the best industry’s in China to work for but that shows how bad it is to work in a factory. Chen had to have her real name private because if Foxconn ever found out who she really was, she would be laid off in a second. Suicide has even been a problem for Foxconn and they had to have nets in the factories to keep employees from jumping. Apple has said that they expect working conditions to be fair for employees and that it should be environmentally friendly.  Many employees don’t stand up for themselves because many of them are low class citizens who can’t find another job. They either have to put up with it or not have a job. What also surprised me was that Chen has never seen a finished product of her work. Chen was amazed of the Ipad and said she has never seen it finished. She only does what she needs to in the assembly line and moves on with her life. 

I believe that these working conditions in China have to be changed. It is not fair that these people have to work long ours in a non friendly environment. But I also believe change will not happen. China is more like a communist country/economy and does not want the wealth to be evenly distributed throughout the citizens. Even though Apple says they want better working conditions, I do not believe that they will actually enforce it. They know that if they try to change it, they will get charged more for the products if it does happen. Being charged more means raising prices in America. And when they raise prices in America, Apple will lose customers. 

Facebook and its Issues

          I read the article "5 Ways to Secure Your Facebook Profile in a Post-Timeline World" by Logan Kugler on February 7, 2012.  The article talks about how easy it is for anyone to access peoples personal information on sites like Facebook.  The article shows you five ways you should check or update you're settings with the new timeline feature they recently put on the website.  I chose this article because you can find my profile on this site, but I do realize that what is put on this site can be found by pretty much anyone and can hinder your job opportunities in the future.  After reading this article I did check my Facebook settings to be sure they are set at what I want them set at.  To sum up the article, its letting users know to secure themselves on Facebook and it introduces the new aspects to Facebook including the new timeline feature.  

          The article had an in depth description for 5 ways to secure your profile.  The first way is to limit your connections or to only allow some people find and add you and look at your pictures.  The next way is to tailor your tags, in other words don't allow just anyone to tag you in your pictures.  The third way is to rein app permission, which makes other people get permission before sending you an app.  The fourth way in securing your profile is to stop others from taking your information with them, this prevents other people from sharing your information through other apps and websites.  The fifth and final step is to reduce your social footprint on Facebook, which means to limit posts to only a certain number of friends.  The article has a much further in depth description with a how to guide to follow in changing these settings.  You can visit the article here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223862/5_ways_to_secure_your_Facebook_profile_in_a_post_Timeline_world?taxonomyId=84&pageNumber=2
If you need further convincing to edit your settings check this article out
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/17-high-school-students-facebook-photos-used-on-porn-site_n_1279523.html


   

New Robots Being Used in Hospitals

Robot cleaner a 'game changer' for hospital infection epidemic

January 26, 2012

CNN Money  By: Eilene Zimmerman

            The article I read was about a robot that sterilizes hospital rooms. This robot is expensive, but it can clean a room in about 5-10 minutes, which is very quick. Besides that, it uses a special type of ultra violet light instead of chemicals, so the hospitals that use the machine do not have to keep buying these chemicals for the robot. Two of these robots are already being used at a hospital in Massachusetts, and they are yielding great results. They have already saved five lives, because they have reduced hospital-acquired infection by 67%.

            Personally, I think that these robots are excellent. They cost about $80,000 which may seem like a great deal at first, but comparing this to the billions of dollars that hospital-acquired infections cost American hospitals each year, it is an extremely small price to pay. They are quick, taking only five to ten minutes for a whole room. This is about as quick as a person can clean a room, but the robot sterilizes everything that its ultra violet light touches, which a cleaning person can not do 100% of the time. The fact that the company is small at the moment means that they are able to pay closer attention to their customer’s feedback, and to make changes that will help hospitals. I think that hospitals should definitely use these robots to clean for several reasons. The two robots at the hospital in Massachusetts have already saved the hospital nearly $3 million already. This is a huge gain for the hospital financially, and a gain in their record, because hospital-acquired infections have dropped significantly as a direct result of these robots. In my opinion, if a hospital is thinking of getting a couple of these robots, I would strongly suggest that they do. I was shocked at how common hospital-acquired infections were after reading this article, and it does not take a great deal of thinking to figure out that this rate of infection from a place that is supposed to help people, is far too high. This is a great use for modern technology, and it can save enormous amounts of time, money, and lives. 

5 ways to secure your Facebook profile

In the article, "In the article, "5 ways to secure your Facebook profile in a post-Timeline world- Computerworld", the author Logan Kugler talks about privacy settings and how Facebook is changing peoples profiles to a timeline structure where anyone can visit any of your past photos, statuses, and/or anything involved with your past Facebook settings. Though this is an interesting structure, like the Kugler says privacy is an issue. Almost all internet sites are becoming accessible to other people. The new timeline structure has five privacy settings which includes, who can look up your timeline by name or contact info, who can send you friend requests, who can send you Facebook messages, who can post on your timeline, and who can see posts by others on your timeline. All of these are very good settings, but there could be more to help with your privacy settings. Other aspects that Kugler reaches are how you can change your settings. People lie about their settings all the time, you should have to be able to tell the truth, but all of your information shouldn't be viewable unless you are a friend with the person. Some people on Facebook just accept everyones friend requests, there should be like a messaging system to approve this friendship instead of someone just clicking accept or decline.  My theory on Facebook is that no matter what Facebook does with your privacy settings there is still going to be someone that can find out your information through Facebook. That is something people are going to have to deal with. No matter how private people can still possibly know one of your friends on Facebook and they'll let them see someones information. Also there are people out there that can hack into peoples information making it so they can find your information. Though this may not be true, I honestly and strongly think that the government can look into any of your information no matter how much you set your privacy settings. Another area on Facebook that Kugler talks about is applications on Facebook. If you don't want people to see your information then you just click on "Remove" on who has permission to see your applications.

Blog # 3

Wesley Williams

2-27-12

Publication Date:February 7, 2012

5 ways to secure your Facebook profile in a post-Timeline world

Facebook

       The article I chose was about facebook. I chose the article because I am a facebook user I go on it a lot, and as soon as it said facebook it caught my eyes. I also have seen a lot of people get there account hacked in to and took over by random people or viruses so that is another reason I read this article. This article was about how they were making changes to facebook, and adding things to it to make it different, and somewhat better. It was telling us about the changes they were making to the profile page as a whole, and other things as well. The article was more about how to keep your profile safe from anything bad that you can think of, well not all of it because the internet is tricky but less of it. They had steps laid out for how to do it exactly by changing little things from public to whatever you desire it to be. But that isn’t all it shows it also shows how people are getting your information in different ways by what you are putting up there, and finding and using the things about your info.  Anyways yes, that is what the majority of the article was about, and just walks you through everything to get safe. This article has let me know so much that I don’t even want facebook anymore as many things as they can get off you I don’t feel like going through the trouble to just hide all that stuff, so I would just deactivate the whole thing.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9223862/5_ways_to_secure_your_Facebook_profile_in_a_post_Timeline_world?taxonomyId=84&pageNumber=2

Secure Your Facebook

The article I read was called, “5 Ways to Secure Your Facebook Profile in a post-Timeline World." This article talks about ways that you can secure your Facebook. The timeline is becoming more and more popular as the days goes on. Some people made the change right away, others waited for others to get the timeline, while others never changed theirs, but soon will come to find out, that it will change on its own. Everytime Facebook changes, so does your privacy settings. This being said, you should be checking your privacy checking one in a while. The first way is to limit your connections, which means limit it to those who can find you, add you, look at your pictures or send you pictures. The second way is to tailor your tags, which means don't allow just some random person to tag you in your picture. The third way is rein in app permission, which means people need to get permission to send you an app. That makes perfect sense because you should have a say in who is sending you apps and if you really want them. The fourth way is stop others from taking your information with them. This prevents people from sharing your information through apps or other websites. The fifth step, last, but not least is reduce your social footprint. This means to limit your posts to a limited number of friends, not everyone. I believe this was a great and useful article. I believe everyone that has a Facebook should read this article. It gives great hints about securing your websites. Facebook is a whole new world, but as in any world we have to be protected. You have to be careful with what you post, comment or tag on Facebook. Facebook is a scary place because people can find your information and know more than you want people to know about you. You need to be aware of the information you put on Facebook. Just make sure you know that people will see information and some of it should be private. Just be cautious of what you put on Facebook because you never know who can see it or be looking at it.

No Service

Apple settles class-action suit over iPhone 4 antenna problem.

By: Dan Gross

CNN

 

In the article I read, it discussed some issues that Apple was having with its consumers. The problem Apple was facing was its consumers were encountering dropped calls while using the iPhone 4. The reasoning for this issue, Apple says was how they designed the newly released phone. Apple stated that when this product was designed, the phones antenna would be wrapped around the body of the phone, to use less space. Upon doing so, if the consumer holds the phone in the wrong position with their hand, it will cause the antenna to be covered, causing the connection of the call to be a bit fuzzy, or completely interrupted by the user’s hand. To counter the issue and complaints made by their consumers, Apple is offering 15 dollars to their consumers who encountered the problem, or a free iPhone case. The company says that this offer will be used for about Twenty-One users. The reasoning for giving away the case is because it actually helps combat the problem. The case has a certain bump on it that will not allow its user to apply their “death grip” upon the phone, which would cause it to disable the connection. Although I do not have the iPhone I think this is the only way Apple should have approached this problem with their product. Apple had made a “flaw” in their product, after selling millions of these phones, they found out after the act that they messed up in designing the phone. After taking a business class last semester, I can understand why Apple is offering the money or free phone case to its customers, solely because they knew they messed and they value their customers. Instead of saying “Oh Well” Apple took complete fault for their problem and did something about it. This is why Apple is one of the best built companies in the world as of right now. Apple has fixed the problem. Each user of this phone was sent an email, and had three month’s to apply for the money or phone case.