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Because of social media and texting 24/7, our minds have become accustomed to emoticons and what they represent. For example, our brains now register the colon - dash - close - bracket as a real smiling face. This phenomenon has been studied by scientists and this break through is not only interesting but also dawns upon the fact of how people right now are beginning to be taken over by technology. If just seeing a few markings of type makes one remember a face, then what more weird things will we be able to connect with text to in the future? It's not just smiley faced emoticons people register as well - there are thousands of emoticons that people now understand are pictures that are smaller versions of a bigger idea such as, OTL representing a person kneeling in failure and even, (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻, to represent the action of flipping a table.

In this article, it states that the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics were the most tweeted and most mentioned moments, athletes and sports up to date. The most mentioned sports on twitter in order were ice hockey, curling, and figure skating while the most mentioned sport on Facebook in order was ice hockey, figure skating and bobsleigh. In all, 40 million Olympic-related tweets were sent during the games and 45 million different Facebook users were responsible for a combined 120 million posts, comments and likes on Facebook. twitter did break down the top moments on Twitter of the games was USA's win over Russia in men's ice hockey shootout was 72, 630 TPM  while Facebook created a video that showed the most popular sports in each country each day. Canada was mainly talking about Ice hockey with a little figure skating 

The youth of today hate politics, but who can blame them when a struggle between old white men for power doesn't really peak there interest. Ontario's premier, Kathleen Wynne, thought she had the solution to the disenfranchised youth problem and turned to the social media site, Reddit, for a solution. on February 11 , 2014, Premier Wynne held an AMA (or ask me anything) from here account on the Canadian reddit board. Many, including myself, were very excited; a politician that's hip, relatable, and will answer questions I have about the government, this was every poli/computer-sci's wet dream. Unfortunately however, madam Wynne has lived up to the rest of her political career, underwhelming (shots fired). During the hour long AMA, hundreds upon hundreds of questions were asked, ones that got to the core of Ontario's political scene, questions about the socio-economic impacts of subway vs LRT. This was shaping up to be the AMA of the century... on the upside, we now know what her favourite books are... and where her next marathon will be held... yay? The premier answered a grand total of 10 questions, the 2 aforementioned included, and all received the same scripted political rhetoric that gave questions instead of answers. Our hopes for a relatable and understanding politician were scrapped by this blunder. All we wanted was a bridge between the politicians that control our lives and the thing we use daily. This was apparently too much to ask, leaving us youth as unconnected and dismissive as ever.

Union is a new type of "Photoshop" app for your phone. This clever app allows you to load multiple images and blend them together in creative ways. This app allows for double exposure on photos for a cool effect, or simply making certain layers of photos transparent. The blending of pictures and using certain effects allows users to get very professional and artistic looking photos. This app also includes tutorial videos on how to use the app for particular artistic ideas. Photos created can then be transferred to your camera roll or other large social media outlets such as twitter and instagram. I personally believe this app is great because I have used many "photo shop" apps and they have all been lacking a certain something while Union seems to provide everything I need to edit multiple photos.

Any Twitter users out there? Twitter is reportedly testing some new design changes, which features your main timeline becoming expandable, so you can see media and related information smack dab in the timeline, as opposed to beside the timeline or on another page. This can speed up and shorten the time you spend on Twitter, and improve users' feelings and experiences. Trying to get more people online, Twitter? If this tests well, we will see a new Twitter, and maybe a lot more people tweeting.

It's been less than 200 years since the birth of photography and in those years it has evolved a lot from the first camera to the smart phones that we so often use to take pictures today. This article maps out the evolution of photography throughout the years, and what it has come to be today. Cameras and photos have come a long way from what they first were. Even the digital camera, has become a smaller part of our lives as the phones with built in cameras had been introduced to our society. In fact, about 741 million mobile phones worldwide now have some photo capability. We no longer look to digital cameras or computers to edit and share our photos. All of those capabilities have been added to our smart phones. It has now become very easy to simply snap a photo and share it on a social networking site like instagram or facebook. In fact, Facebook has 10, 000 times more photos than the Library of Congress. Many of us have lost the need for digital cameras. Mobile photography is the latest evolution and many are experiencing the shift. Our phones are always with us and it provides us with the perfect camera when a picture perfect opportunity is right in front of us. 91% of smartphone owners take a picture at least once a month while only 73% of digital camera owners do the same. Personally, I've also experienced this shift. I used to have a digital camera and would bring it with me on field trips and special occasions. It was great to have, but now that I think about it before I had my smartphone and only used the camera I missed out on all the photo opportunities that I had in my day to day life. I only captured the big events and even when I took those photos, I always got a little lazy when it came to transferring them to my computer and sharing them with friends and family. It usually sat on my camera for a while before I finally got around to doing it. With my smart phone, I am simply able to snap a photo and share it without losing a mome

nt. I find it very convenient. Our lifestyle with technology has made our day to day life easier for us and now it is making it possible to capture our day to day life, wherever we are. To me, this move to mobile photography hasn't killed photography, but transformed it.

This article explains and acknowledges this week in Google. Google is improving its technology through their web browser, mobile devices, and in their social network. This is good for Google as a industry to attract more consumers to their products and this is really a step in a right direction for them improving and being recognized as one of the elite brands and companies in all fields of technology. I am happy for the success of Google and I hope they can continue to strive and do their best to satisfy their users with more faster and more efficient products delivering a high performance at every use. Also, I hope Google can continue to add and maintain a significant importance to the development and increase of their products throughout our evolving world of technology. 

Timeline is an online tool created by Zach Wise. This tool allows users to develop timelines on the internet by administrating content from sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Google maps, and Sound Cloud. It also provides users a JavaScript, and HTML based tool. They can provide content about media on their websites using coding.

CSS is going to add a new style of viewing the site; pages. The user would have to flip each page to get to the next part of the site. Although this is mainly directed for tablets, it will still be able to work on laptops and desktops. This is ideal for not spoiling the article by only giving a piece at a time and it also gives the traditional feel of reading a book.

Twitter is testing out new design changes which makes the main Twitter timeline expandable so that you can see media and related information right in the timeline instead of off to the side or clicking off to another page. They have started the testing on a few clients and if it is successful, they plan to make it permanent. I think this is a bad idea because it will just add complications. Besides, if I wanted to see the news, i would just go on another page.

Twitter is testing out new design changes which makes the main Twitter timeline expandable so that you can see media and related information right in the timeline instead of off to the side or clicking off to another page. You can now open a tweet and see how many people retweeted it, see the threaded conversation related to the tweet or related photos or vidoes. When looking at a picture, you wont have to open another page just to see it, it will come up on the same page and you will be able to exit it.

The main idea of this article is that a great amount of social networking websites can view everything on your account, deleted or not. This is a major breach of privacy because when a user hits 'Delete' they expect it to erase it entirely. This is not entirely true. This also applies to private chat conversations. As a major breach of privacy, this information is easily available no matter how hard you tried to get rid of it. This is an important article because it applies to everyone, including employees. This means that your employer can view any unsavory pictures or posts that you have posted. But is this a bad thing? This technology can be used to catch any criminal activity. Does this mean you should stop using private conversations? No, this means that if you are dealing with anything of a sensitive nature, use a phone.

Good Luck

this article is about the reasons in why not to buy an iPad because it is the same, just because we live in 21th century we want everything that is new and up to date.  the reasons are that it is inappropriate for kids,too expensive, an iPad is the same and good enough, the ecosystem of apple is also bad because one u buy music from iTunes you can only access it from only apple devices. also there is no point in buying it because most the time you wont need it.

We should all probably know that when technology starts upgrading as time goes by, we always want to get the new products. Our generation is getting more and more into technology and in this article, it explains a study of how we are digitally getting distracted in our academics. This study shows that 47% of teachers should make courses and content in digital literacy into a school's curriculum. I agree with this because as our generation spends our days mainly on our phones or on computers, we wouldn't be distracted on the technology if we have our work finished with it. The only back draw to this is that many students would just go on Google or Wikipedia for their answers as the Internet has a huge amount of information displayed for us to use. This article relates to portable computing because it's starting to affect how we do in our education. In addition, it relates to eLifestyle because we're using this technology as a daily part of our lives and if we start to use it as a method of education, we can use it as a form of gaining new information.

The article, by Neha Prakash, is about a study on the effects of technology on the current generation of students. The study concluded with 87% of teachers saying students were easily distracted and had short attention spans. This is most likely due to the internet providing such quick and easy access within a keystroke in search engines such as Wikipedia and Google. Students are used to having things accomplished and out of the way so quickly that they no longer have the attention span to complete more complicated and time consuming tasks. Due to this, students lack time management and also do not check if their sources are reputable. A solution to this problem could be to incorporate digital literacy and technology into schools' curriculum. With this additional knowledge, methods of education can be improved in today's technological environment. This relates to elifestyle in that we use technology so much that we can take it for granted. Normally, we do not acknowledge the consequences of repetitive and prolonged use of social media, search engines, cell phones, and so on. As the class of ICS2O, we learn to use technology in a healthy balance in our lives. We are at the forefront of electronic education, using sites such as diigo, Google Drive, and Google Reader to complete assignments and engage in the events of the outside world. While there are negative impacts to the overuse of technology, like most other things, technology, used in balance with other aspects of life, can be beneficial.

This article states that a new study has shown that more and more kids/teenagers are distracted by technologies which affect their learning.  87% of the teachers in this study have said that "technology is creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans."  Other teachers also claim that "technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically."  Teachers, though, remained somewhat optimistic about digital impact, with 77% saying Internet search tools have had a "mostly positive" impact on their students' work. I think that technologies help out a lot in kids learning however it could still distract them. A lot of kids use the internet with homework and study help which could in some cases is a very beneficial thing. They would learn and find out more about the subject they are studying. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, says that maybe it is not the problem with tech, but the lack of digital literacy training in students that creates the problem. I agree with this also. 

People use iPads to read, watch videos, play music and so much more. Now, they will also be able to control things from within the home with their tablet. Sources say that the iPad will soon be able to control your t.v., and Control4, and company based in Utah has already started thinking past this. They have an iPad app which can be used to control security features, lighting, temperature and entertainment media. Not only would you be able to access the things from your home while you're at home, but also while you're out. You could turn up the heat in your house before you came in or turn off the lights if you forgot to do it when you left. This app also turns iPads into a surveillance system. You would be able to see what's going on around your house but for a much cheaper price. I'm sure this is something many people would like because it means less work for everyone.

December 10th was the day to remember the late Nelson Mandela. It was a day to commemorate the life of a great man who fought oppression and racism. Unfortunately a few world leaders had seen the memorial as some kind of a joke. The Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Barack Obama the American president and the British Prime Minister David Cameron took a selfie during the ceremony. I find this behavior to be really disrespectful and rude. There kind of actions should not be done by anyone in any circumstance especially world leaders. I think that all three of these people bring their countries shame by showing the manners of the 2nd grader. I hope that these people clean up their act and properly represent their countries.

This article talks about the new twitter update which includes a new twitter profile page. But many people question this update because Twitter has made profile pages look much a like Facebook profile pages. The new larger profile picture, and the different header placement is very similar to the Facebook profile picture and timeline picture. Another change in Twitter is the variety of font sizes for tweets that have more importance than others on your profile. Also, when tweeting photos, it will no longer show a link but a small picture card in your feed. This is very similar to the Facebook style of posting photos on your Wall. Twitter is becoming a lot more like Facebook and this may cause the number of people that use Facebook to switch to the more popular Twitter since many of the features are now similar.