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A nutritionist, Jane Harrison, from MyOptumHealth writes this article discussing how and why obesity rates have doubled for adults and tripled for children since 1980. She gives detailed evidence as to why it happens. She goes on to say how there are other causes besides not exercising and eating healthy. Genetics, culture, emotions, age, and medical problems play a role, too. The scariest part about obesity is it raises the risk of chronic and deadly conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. I picked this article because this goes hand-in-hand with what we have been discussing this week in lecture. The readings we have been reading in "They Say, I Say" are a lot like this article by Jane Harrison. She makes a terrific point when she says, "It's little wonder that we have an obesity epidemic. Food is everywhere, from roadsides and vending machines to television and overstuffed supermarket shelves. That, coupled with a life of sitting - in cars, at desks, on couches - has set us on the road to an obesity epidemic." If there weren't McDonalds and Wendys every 2 miles, Americans would be better off and so would their health. The best ways to become a healthier person are of course being physically active and eating sensibly. Ultimately, it is not up to the government and fast food companies. It is up to us, the Americans. We have to make the decision to implement discipline into our lives to become healthier people.

A few weeks ago I made a diigo on the Verizon AT&T lawsuit over the Verizon commercials. According to a note we just received from AT&T, "Verizon and AT&T have dismissed the litigation between them in Georgia and New York." Here is the note: "IT IS HEREBY STIPULATED AND AGREED by and between Plaintiff/Counterclaim Defendant Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless ("Verizon Wireless") and Defendant/Counterclaim Plaintiff AT&T Mobility LLC ("AT&T") that pursuant to Rule 41(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: (a) Verizon Wireless's claims against AT&T in the above- captioned action are hereby dismissed without prejudice, and (b) AT&T's counterclaims against Verizon Wireless in the above-captioned action are hereby dismissed without prejudice." With the back and forth battle between AT&T and Verizon commercials have been less directed to the phones, and more directed to the service provided. I personally rather hear about the new phones and great applications, rather than in No Where, Nevada if I will be getting 3G YouTube goodness. What clearly defines 3G is more important to me. AT&T should target their commercials on how much faster the 3G network is compared to Verizon. I hope that in the near future we can find much more informative commercials than bickering.

As far as literature review sites go SparkNotes is one of the best. When placed in the hands of the lazy, this website, and the convenience it brings, can lead to a quick and painful academic downfall. However, if used merely as a study resource SparkNotes can substantially increase a students grades. For example, You've just finished reading The Lord of the Flies and you've been assigned an essay on symbolism due next class. You don't particularly remember any symbols from your reading, so you check spark notes which gives you a few examples and leads you in the right direction. Add a little of your own synthesis and some specific incidents that support your statements and your essay will be done before you know it! This also works with hard to follow Shakespearean plots and deep character development. Along with being able to help you learn, SparkNotes can also help you study and remember old books that you've read just in time for your final. Or it can help you study for your SATs. In fact, SparkNotes has a lot of sections designed to help high School and College students succeed. SparkNotes is a great tool as long as you remember to do the real work yourself!

Time magazine is a great display of how multimedia and advertising has taken over writing. Just on the main page alone you'll find videos and podcasts, which are completely different from Time Magazine's old periodicals. In addition articles are rated and views can be counted giving readers instantaneous information about the popularity of an article, which wouldn't be feasible with a printed magazine. In addition, there are also polls, apps, facebook pages, and RSS feeds displaying the degree in which technology has become a part of Time's product. Time is a perfect example of how new technology can be implemented to improve a user base.\n\nI think this site relates to our course work because it is such a fine example of how multimedia can be used in almost any situation. Formerly, Time focused completely on its magazine and viewed any form of internet news sites as competition. This is because they offered Time's product for free. But, by adopting multimedia and the internet Time has been able to stay mainstream and maintain respect instead of slowly wasting away like many other news papers and magazines are in this new internet age.

This is Google's preview page for Google Wave. Google wave is an up and coming collaboration technology that is being developed by Google. It allows for conversations to occur and grow in a nonlinear fashion. Conversation members can converse and add information to the wave as if they were instant messaging. They can also add images, links, and videos to further enrich the content. Then members can go back to old content and edit or correct it. This is just the basic premise behind Google Wave, there is a lot more information on this website. Personally, I think this is the future of conversational technology and will soon become the new standard. It appears that this will just be another phase in the evolution of human literature. Because of this it seemed natural to include this page on my Diigo bookmarks. I'm looking forward to seeing how writing and human speech adapts to this new technology.

It seems like everything in the medical field is trying to go towards technology that requires less human interaction. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are working with a product called "CellScope." CellScope is a microscope that attaches to a camera-equipped cell phone and produces two kinds of imaging, called brightfield and fluorescence microscopy. This device can take images of disease samples and transmit them to medical labs throughout the world. Their goal is to use mobile communications networks as a cost-effective way for medical staff to screen hematologic and infectious diseases in parts of the world that lack access to advanced microscopic equipment. This is just another example of how technology is taking over the medical field. It seems like doctors are required to do less and less work as time goes on and technology becomes more advanced. This was very interesting to me because last week my uncle was emailing me about this. My uncle is a surgeon in Owensboro, Kentucky. He was telling me how he does still perform surgeries, but he can tell that in the future he won't be performing as many. It is obvious the medical industry relies on technology to assist them, and they will only rely on them more in the future.

I know I'm a little late, but Firefox's birthday didn't occur on a diigo class day. But anyways, this is a little article that LifeHacker did about Firefox and its history. It starts at Netscape, moves to Mozilla, goes to Firefox (and all of its versions), and ends with today! It also has a nifty and well done video promoting Firefox. Anyways, I think Firefox's birthday is worth celebrating. Its such a great browser and it really promotes the spirit of the internet; freedom, sharing, connecting for a greater good. Its addons are a perfect example. There is a great creative community that displays a wide variety of needs and wants. It creates a customizable browsing experience for everyone, which is one of the best parts of Firefox and why its truly worth celebrating.

This article is a very interesting one for the computer geeks of the world and maybe even for government. Google is wanting to map out the inside of businesses and large buildings so that you can no only find your way to the building but the nearest door and which stair case to take and which hallway to turn down. Google is starting a new generation of maps online.   Government on the other hand might not like this. If you map out the inside of the building isn't that making it more accessible to terrorists to plan an attack or for thieves to plan and escape after a jewelry heist? Where will google go from there? Could this turn into and invasion of privacy?   What this means to the CIT majors is that almost anything is possible. If google can map out the indoors what is to stop us from doing anything? The sky.... The basement is our limit.

This story amused me. It hits on grammar, speech, and technology. The story reads that the average teen sends 2000 messages a month and 60 2-way messages a day. The story goes on to tell a story of a mothers struggle to understand why her son would rather text then call friends or family, this is hard to grasp for any parent or elder. They really just do not understand today's society. "But does texting make today's kids stupid, as Mark Bauerlein writes in his book ' The Dumbest Generation". This leads me to my point. Texting is like muscle memory. You practice and practice for that one good stance in baseball, that great soccer kick, or doing hundreds of pushups. That same concept of muscle memory is taking place within our very fingers! Kids are use to texting short words, and or incorrect spelling to make longer words shorter. Then like the mom said this is happening 2000 times a month! So what is happening is teenagers are so use to typing out short incorrect words to slim down their texts so they can send fast responses or questions, and are forgetting to use correct grammar within their own school papers! I for one can agree to this, because I have done so on occasion. \n

This site gives some great examples of how images can convey messages, and even arguments. this correlates with the image rhetoric reading we did from the owl web site. reading through i found it interesting how much i realized i am influenced through images on a daily basis. This site altered my perceptions of advertisements and propaganda. I see now that the two are more related than they are different.

Since alot of our talk during diigo time is about Call of DUty i decided to keep it up and to post this video of the terrorist level in CoD. CoD in the beginning of the game gives you a notification that sames some content may be offending to you and you have the option to skip it. In this level you walk into the airport and shoot down civilians. Then as you proceed through the airport and continue killing civilians some opposition comes up. Police come but they stand no chance against your light machine guns. After that the swat team shows up with their riot shield. Now my concern with this is that should this be in a video game that little kids play? Yes it is rated mature but playing on live you meet alot of underage kids and at this point in there life i don't think that these are very good images.

Want to see how real men live? A simple charity auction done by Mr. and Mrs. Bill Gates raised an amazing 35,000 dollars! Bill Gates for the last two years has offered a guided tour of his Lake Washington property. This year, even in recession, was still a lot, 8,600 dollars. What is this mystique, that can make people just throw away 35,000 dollars of a visit of one person's home, and if Bill Gates can make this amount of money, then wouldn't you think Hollywood celebrities would also join the charity cause and do the same? To be honest if I made 100,000 a year, I would probably be willing to give out near 5,000, one for charity, and two I mean… it's Bill $#@%ing Gates. What nerdy, geeky, or just sane person wouldn't want to go meet the man. When you visit the gizmodo link I have provided you can also watch a very detailed 3d video showing off some of the sweet tricks to his Washington home. I would highly encourage you to read the article and wonder to yourself, why haven't other people thought of this too?

Robots is an interesting topic and as young people in general we need to be concerned and aware of what is going on. As tech guys we need to really be able to know what is going on and be able to possibly program one of these things or at the very least be able to use it once it has come out. This site has all the latest info about robots. It has videos and articles all combined into one. This website is like a Wired or a Slashdot page except it is designed solely for the robotic community.

This is a Wikipedia article that tell us that there is no longest sentence. It gives some very good examples of how sentences can go on infinitely and still be grammatically correct. This article also gives some examples at the bottom and some of these sentences stretch out to millions of words. In conclusion to posting this article i would like to say that you should not make your sentences that long. Short and precise will keep your readers interested and Hemingway said.

Since we are using newer technologies on the Internet, such as Twitter and Diigo, I thought this article was appropriate. As in the title, this article is about, 50 things that are being killed by the Internet. The article points out a lot of things that many people wouldn't think would be affected by the internet. The article says that Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the "fans in mourning" mawkishness that otherwise predominates. It also points out before mobile phones, people had to actually be on time for their appointments. In this age, people just text the person they are about to meet, so they know they'll be running late. It also states that the lunch break is often lost, and instead people just sit at their desk and eat, while checking emails and browsing for vacations.

I picked slashdot.org because...well...slashdot is for NERDS! GEEKS!!! Someone who might be in the Computer Information Technology learning community! LIKE ME! On a more serious note though, I picked slashdot because it involves people like the CIT learning community. We are nerds/geeks we know it, and love it. Slashdot is composed of authors that are IT gurus and love to talk about as what there title says, 'news that matters' which is straight and to the point.\n\nLike any good nerd we like to put in our two cents. Slashdot added a message board to reply to any post the authors make. The articles composed by Slashdot will always involve technology in someway. Whether it's a post on the internet's birthday or a post about how red hat enterprise linux 5.4 has been released. Slashdot has posts to the point for people like "us". Its not filled with clutter or garbage about stupid news about Jon and Kate + 43000, its news that MATTERS. Simple as that.\n

"This does awesome ****" a quote professor Barlow. Point Grey has just setup an incredible demo of its latest technology. It is a new webcam using the new USB 3.0 technology. It shoots and yields an uncompressed video in FULL 1080p at 60fps! I am not going to lie, this is awesome! Just picture watching on a high definition television : a long distance pen pal, your husband or wife that is constantly traveling, or your mother and father from college with HD technology and no latency. "It's pretty stunning" says gizmodo.com. The camera uses technology from the newest Sony camera that has recently been able to shoot not only very high resolution pictures, but also HD videos. Now this is just a prototype but it has set a market release date of very late 2009 or early 2010. Now since it is using USB 3.0 technology it will be able to display and stream the high definition of video (depending on if the user has a decent internet connection). The camera prototype currently lacks an autofocus but has a manual focus to let it capture nice clear images. The only downfall is the lack of users that do not use the rare PCI-Express-to-USB-3.0 card. I personally cannot wait for this to come out. Depending on the price, I will keep this in mind. This could be a neat thing to play around with, or easy to troubleshoot computer problems without the need to leave my favorite chair. \n

I chose this article because I thought it related quite well to our next project. This article discusses the IT job market lookout for 2009 and whether the field is growing or shrinking. He concludes that it is growing in certain fields including security, virtualization, and data centers. The author also stresses the competitiveness for jobs in regards to your resume. Make them professional and only highlight your strengths, preferably with numbers whenever possible. The future looks bright for us as we graduate in ~4years. Hopefully by themn the economy will have gotten to where it was before and companies will be hiring fresh out of college perspective employees. One thing that caught my eye was the phrase "must be willing to work from home". I don't know one person that would want to go into the office as compared to staying at home doing the same thing. Flexibility to work from wherever you want, now that's my kind of job!

The intersection of broadband and energy can lead to efficiency and technology innovation. What's needed is wider access, standards, and right regulations, say execs and officials at an FCC hearing. Read this blog post by Martin LaMonica on Green Tech.

I found this website while doing research for my CIT IS project. This is a government website that can provide people with the option to use an Occupational Outlook Handbook to look up a job or field he/she is interested in. It seems like it has every job I can think of. This is a great source I found. You can look up statistics of jobs and whether they are growing or not. I found it to be a big help with my project when I was searching for Network Administrators. It gave me a lot of insight into that career field. This is a great article for our class because we have all been working on our CIT IS projects. Most of us have been researching different jobs within the CIT field. This website will have what you are looking for. This Occupational Outlook Handbook can give us a good idea where each job is now and where that job will be down the road. This goes perfectly with our project. I think this site would be useful for any of us. It is a great way to research what you think you are interested in, and maybe decide whether you like that job or not. The amount of detail on this website for each job is incredible. This website was useful for me. It helped me out with my CIT IS project, and I think I will be using it in the future.