The PDS Summer Times The Journalism Workshop, PDS Summer Programs Summer 2013

‘100% Organic Journalism—No Artificial

News Added.’

What is social media? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram are a few examples of the many ways that people interact with each other through the Internet. Whether we think that they are good or bad, social media is playing a larger and larger role in our lives.

As with most technology, however, there are some downsides. Cyberbullying is one of the ways that social media can be harmful. Cyberbullying occurs when someone harasses or threatens you online. But this doesn’t only happen via e-mail or cell phone; it can also happen on websites like Facebook, where people can create fake profiles to hide their real identities. Last year, Facebook admitted that of the more than one billion profiles on its site, about 80 million were fake.

People can use social media to take advantage of other users on the Web. By pretending to be your friend, they try to get you to reveal personal information, such as your address, social security number, or bank account details, which they can use for criminal purposes. There are also lots of examples of people whose reputations have been damaged through the abuse of social media. Make sure you know that you can trust people you ‘friend’ on websites.

Virtual or Real Friends?Even though social media can impact

human relationships negatively, there are still benefits. People connect and communicate globally through social media. According to ProCon.org, a website that looks at the good and bad sides of a wide range of issues, musicians use social networking to attract an audience online even if they don’t have a recording contract.

Social media can also help bring

Social Media: Double-Edged Sword By Sunit Chakraborty, Nicholas Kovalenko, Kelly Shao, and Hannah Su

people together: “Friendships can improve on social media because you can contact your friends more easily and quickly,” says David Chesebrough, a counselor at PDS Summer Programs. But that is not necessarily always true. Sometimes social media can pull you away from friends and family. A lot of people overuse their electronic devices and become obsessed with trying to impress their ‘virtual friends’ instead of interacting with real people who are right in front of them.

So, is social media good or bad? It is neither! Some people strongly support it, while others think it’s too dangerous, or just dislike it. Others have mixed feelings. “I think it’s great, and like everything else it has both good and bad things,” says Nabanita Chakraborty, mother of PDS camper Sunit.

Does social media benefit friendships and family life? Mia, a 16-year old camper at PDS who estimates that she spends about five hours a day online, thinks so. “In some ways, yes,” she says. This is especiually true with the family members you don’t get to see every day. However, Mia is not alone in thinking that while social media can do good things for friendships, it can also create “pointless drama.”

Courtesy of thecultureist.com

Okay, so you have a phone that lets you see the person you are talking to. He or she can see you, too. You can shop online? What about learning via an online classroom? Telecommuting? Home computers? Touch screens? Microwave ovens? Online libraries? Been there. Done that. Big deal.

That is, until you hear that all these inventions were predicted very accurately more than 40 years ago by Geoffrey Hoyle in his book Living in the Future. Geoffrey, son of the world-famous astronomer and science fiction writer Fred Hoyle, originally wrote his book for children in 1970. His predictions, however, continue to amaze adults as well as children.

“In the teacher’s room, many vision screens are connected to the vision phone. On these, the teacher can see all the children in the class”

-Geoffrey Hoyle, Living in the Future

“It is time for school. Inside a closet in your bedroom there is a vision phone. As you dial your school number, the screen lights up and there

is your teacher...”-Geoffrey Hoyle, Living in the Future

Courtesy of Skype Illustration from ‘2011 - Living in the Future’

Illustration from ‘2011 - Living in the Future’

1970s Predictions Ring Eerily TrueBy Arushi Ahuja, Emaan Anwar, and Jason Bradley

Courtesy of e-idsolutions.com

The 2013 Journalism Workshop cub reporters – morning and afternoon class (right to left)

For the two weeks of our workshop this summer, we have studied journalism and explored multiple aspects of communication–from cave paintings and smoke sig-nals to Twitter, social networking, and blogs. We’ve writ-ten and edited this newspaper, set up a blog, recorded podcasts, uploaded videos, made animations, and even visited The Princeton Packet to seek managing editor Cal Killeen’s views on the future of communication.

One thing is very clear: Today’s digital technology is amazingly rich and exciting. It is truly revolutionizing the way that we consume and produce information.

All technologies have both good and bad uses. How-ever, this should not make us Luddites (people who are opposed to technological innovation). History is full of examples of unfounded fears of new technology. Once, people were convinced that the printing press would

lead to information overload, and that mobile phones would cause cancer, make planes crash, and gas stations explode.

Instead, we should embrace and explore the new and exciting opportunities that technology of-

fers us, while of course not for-getting to look at the possible downsides. And before we rush out to buy the latest gadget, we might also remind ourselves of Bill Gates’ observation that ‘Content is King’.

The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be

Scan here to visit the PDS Summer Times blog for more stories, photos, videos, and podcasts!

URL: rloewy.edublogs.org

PDS SUMMER TIMES

New technology always leads to new debates about whether all of these innovations are useful or even necessary. The cub reporters at the Journalism Workshop have been researching topics such as drones, smartphones, self-driven cars, and robots, to look at the good and the bad

Robots

Smartphones

Drones

Technology: The Pros and Cons of Innovation

Self-Driven Cars

2

My iPhone - by Eesha The Back Story: How We Created a Photo of a Poem about an iPhone on a Phone

First, I typed a poem about my iPhone on the computer, and then I sent it as a text message from my phone to our instructor.

By changing my contact name on his phone to “by Eesha B.” the byline magically appeared above the text message. Then, we took a screenshot of the poem.

We sent this screenshot to our art director’s computer, and as the fi-nal stage, she superimposed the screenshot of the text message onto a photo of an iPhone with a blank screen. The rest is history.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have robots in your house? The Honda company has developed a highly advanced humanoid robot, called Asimo, that can interact with people. Another humanoid robot, Nao, developed by Aldebaran, a French technology company, can interact with kids while they receive vaccinations.

Robots have been described as helpful and high-tech, but have you ever thought what might happen if they turn deadly? What if a robot malfunctions while performing a medical operation? Or if a robot fails to fix a rocketship in space? Things could go wrong in countless ways.

Some workers are losing their jobs because robots can do the same tasks, and sometimes more efficiently (cheaper) and more accurately, too.

Graphic by Humza Iqbal

By Humza IqbalAs you read this, a drone could be

flying thousands of feet over your head, listening to your phone calls, tracking your online activity, and filming every move you make when you step outdoors. A drone could also very well be saving someone’s life.

Everybody is talking about these unmanned aircrafts that are controlled remotely by humans using a joystick, cameras, and a control panel. As the way that drones are used is developing, people are debating whether drones are useful or unnecessary, good or bad.

Drones can save peoples’ lives when they are in a pickle. Stranded on a mountain that is hard for rescuers to climb? A drone can easily land on the mountain and save you. Drones can also be used by firemen. Drones can be used to help spot outbreaks of fires, and they can even be programed to help put out the flames. They can also respond to many other 9-1-1 emergencies.

However, robots can be expensive. Asimo, for example, costs about one million dollars! Don’t worry, though, because robots also do some great things. Robotic rovers such as NASA’s ‘Curiosity’, have explored worlds not yet visited by us, and they have saved lives on the battlefield by transporting wounded soldiers to field hospitals.

P.S. This article was written by a

human, not a robot.

Some drones can even disable bombs, fire rockets, chase storms, and help to extract oil. All of these jobs are dangerous and hard for us humans to do. Drones can be used in scientific research to survey animals.

“Drones might be making people lazier by doing things for them, but you can use the same excuse for washing machines and dishwashers,” says Li Yue, mother of PDS Journalism camper Annie Wei. Drones do have some downsides, which is why they are such a hot topic right now. With drones able to eavesdrop on our conversations and follow our movements, people are worried about their privacy. Some also fear that terrorists will use drones to destroy towns and cities. They are already being used in wars, both to spy on the enemy and fire rockets.

“I think drones are bad. They can be good, but I wouldn’t take the chance for a drone to do something bad in return,” says camper Pia LaPlaca.

By Annie Wei

Imagine that you are driving along the highway. A car passes you, and as you look across at the driver, you see that she is reading a book and eating a snack, with no hands on the steering wheel.

Welcome to the world of the self-driving car, as pioneered by Google. These amazing cars can drive themselves, allowing the ‘driver’ to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. This

also allows the driver to do things that typically cannot (or, at least, should not!) be done while driving. These cars can also reduce the number of crashes each year because of their highly advanced sensors.

However, these new cars are not perfect. For example, Art MacCarley of KSBY News says that one downside to a self-driving car is that, “there’s always a possibility of a fault.”

Unfortunately, a “fault” could result in a fatal injury. Who knows? A self-driving car with a mind of its own could lock its doors and drive straight into the ocean. Think about it. Do you want a self-driving car? Or would you rather stick with a regular car?

Courtesy of DC.Streetsblog.org

Smartphones. They’re like regular phones, only smarter. They can complete many tasks and allow you to surf the web wherever you are. With these phones becoming so popular, people are debating the upsides and downsides of owning a smartphone.

To start with the positive, smartphones allow you to get instant information; with constant access to the Internet, you can search for anything, any time.

They are also convenient. In the pre-mobile phone days you used phone books, payphones, paper maps, books, or encyclopedias to find information. Smartphones allow you to look up information using just one device.

Smartphones are also host to countless useful apps; apps that can act as dictionaries, games, coupons, weather channels, or clocks are only a few.

However, smartphones do have some downsides. For example, they

By Teddy Deng

can be a constant distraction; social networks are already distracting enough, and now you can take them with you wherever you go. “Smartphones are shrinking our attention spans,” says Jess Scheve in her blog article ‘Pros and Cons of Smartphones’.

Furthermore, some people use their phones constantly–for surfing, gaming, social networking, calling, and texting–that they become addicted to the device.

Smartphones also make you impatient. You will get so used to having a search result, video, or message load in a fraction of a second that you become impatient when things don’t show up at lightning speed.

Apps can also be negative because some can be bad for your phone. You might not know it now, but some of those awesome apps on the market are killing your phone’s battery or filling it with viruses.

By Pia LaPlaca

Scan here to watch Eesha recite her poem!

Scan here to watch a videoabout Google’s driverless car

PDS SUMMER TIMES 3

By Nicholas Kovalenko

The first time I played games online, I wasn’t sure if I would like it. My friends first got me into gaming, electronic games that thousands of people spend time playing on computers or devices like the Xbox. At first I thought it was a bad idea to be gaming instead of studying or talking with my friends; however, soon I grew to enjoy playing with my friends, or just talking without making my mom mad with me for using my phone.

As my second semester of the school year started, I realized that my grades were going downhill. So while I was playing on Steampowered.com, a website that allows you to play games while talking, I asked my friends for study advice, and they helped me.

The very next week my grades had moved up from Cs and Bs to As and Bs. So as you can see, gaming can be a wonderful thing. There also may be downsides. When I interviewed Sunit Chakraborty, a camper at PDS, about this topic, he said, “There are some flaws. But when kids need entertainment and want to communicate even when they don’t have phones, it’s a perfect solution.” I used to hate video games, but when I got into gaming, it changed many ways I think about things, even school. But most of all, it led me to write this article to tell you about gaming!

“It’s hard to make predictions–especially about the future,” the Danish humorist Robert Storm Petersen once said. Still, many experts try to tell us how they think our future will look. And the really brave ones even have tried to predict what will happen with the Internet and communication–two areas that have changed faster than most people would ever have guessed. We have gone back in time to look at some famous predictions. It turns out that quite a few were accurate. Others were way off!

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, knows a thing or two about computers. But he probably does not like to be reminded that, in 2004, he predicted that the spam

problem would be solved by 2006. As we all see every time we check our email, this prediction unfortunately did not prove to be correct. Almost three-quarters of all emails in 2012 were spam.

In 2003, Sonia Zjawinski, a journalist on the technology magazine Wired, predicted that in 2013 there would be such a thing as wrist phones. “Apple redefined the desktop, laptop, and MP3 player. The next insanely great thing: an LCD arm cuff that includes a PDA, wireless Internet, a mini iPod, and, of course, a phone,” she wrote a decade ago. Sonia Zjawinski even got the name right: The iPhone.

“The bracelet’s motion sensor allows you to scroll through apps and files with the flick of a wrist; its clasp holds a digicam for use during video calls; and its wireless ear clip lets you listen and speak

to callers. And everything can be done via voice recognition or touchscreen,” she predicted.

Well, Ms. Zjawisnki was close, though we don’t yet have wrist phones with all those features!

Past Predictions–With the Benefit of 20/20 HindsightBy Sibhy Rajesh, Jay Rana, Aaliyah Sayed, and Katherine Wu

On the topic of phones, a commissioner at the FCC, the government organization that regulates communication, predicted in 1961 that “There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, or radio service inside the United States.”

However, the very next year, a team at Bell Labs developed Telstar 1, the first active communications satellite capable of two-way communications. Telstar 1 was the first satellite to transmit live television images between Europe and North America. Finally, the iPad. Along with the iPhone it is one of the greatest products from Apple in the past ten years. But in a video made

in 1987, the company presented a tablet called the ‘Knowledge Navigator’. It had a ‘Siri’ (though male and wearing a white tuxedo) to answer questions and commands from the user, along with a ‘Facetime’ video conferencing feature, and the ability to call up and move around images on a touch-screen.

What about our own predictions? One thing we certainly predict is that you will enjoy watching the ‘Knowledge Navigator’ video.

Confessions of a Gamer

Tony Stark, the main character in the 2008 superhero movie Iron Man, has revolutionized the idea of the future in our eyes. He uses holograms to design his improved Iron Man suit. On top of that, he instructs his computer, Jarvis, to create the

brewer, a shaver, a harmonica, and a global voice translator with over 50 languages. It is not a real phone yet but the idea may become a reality.

Another approach to phones is that they could become pieces of jewelry. Kimberley Odewole,

Gadgets, Gadgets Everywhere!By Arushi Ahuja and Emaan Anwar

Courtesy of dongholee.com, geek.com, pomegranatephone.com, and sobrietystones.com

This timeline is based on a number of experts’ pre-dictions of what may await us over the communication horizon.

2014People will have access

to more information on the Internet than on TV

2015Devices with display

screens will be using or-ganic light emitting diodes that consume less energy. Batteries on these devices will last much longer.

2016Blu-ray’s place could be

taken by the holographic versatile disc that has a

much greater storage ca-pacity than a regular disc. Each of these discs can hold about 200 DVDs.

2017We might see widespread

use of flexible electron-ic paper. Its video ca-pability could enable fully interactive news-papers.

2018Though some fridges

already order food from the Internet, within five years many more appli-ances will be connected to the Web.

2019The ‘exaflop barrier’

could be broken by com-puting being able to do a quintillion calculations per second.

2020TVs could have 16 times

the definition of today’s. We might see holographic television as a luxury option.

2021-2023Some devices won’t need

wired electricity be-cause they have antennae connected to energy nodes that are close by. Humans will be able to talk to their computers. That is, if machines can think.

Is This the Next, Next New Technology?By Eesha Bhaskar

Just scan this QR code, sit back, and let yourself be amazed.

body suit and within a couple of minutes, he is wearing the Iron Man suit. Iron Man uses his advanced technology to save the world from terrorists and villains. Soon, this high-tech world may become our own.

The first holographic phone is most likely going to be launched as a prototype by 2015. Eventually, we may be seeing people in holographic form, and we will be able to talk to others through similar devices.

In the future, something like the Pomegranate NS08 may be the new phone everyone has. The Pomegranate Phone’s website advertises a phone with a projector for movies and business presentations, a coffee

who posted a slideshow about future communication on Prezi.com, thinks there might be beads on bracelets or necklaces and people would exchange beads instead of exchanging phone numbers. People would press a bead, and it would start to glow and vibrate.

Designers and engineers at Motorola predict that cellphones may become small adhesive devices that stick to your skin.

For now, smartphones, tablets, and laptops as thin as air are what everybody wants in our society. But with the tough competition between Apple, Android, Samsung, and Microsoft, these devices may soon be a thing of the past.

The PDS Summer TimesThe 2013 Journalism Workshop at PDS Summer Programs

Editor-in-Chief/Instructor: Reuben LoewyCounselors: Caroline Lippman and David Chesebrough

PDS SUMMER TIMES 4

Arushi Ahuja, 13Emaan Anwar, 11Eesha Bhaskar, 11Jason Bradley, 12

Sunit Chakraborty, 10Teddy Deng, 11Humza Iqbal, 11

Seung Yeon Koh, 12Nicholas Kovalenko, 11

STAFF WRITERS

With many thanks to Jamie Bean, the PDS Summer Programs, and The Princeton Packet for all their support.

Did You Know? Communication by the Numbers By Eesha Bhaskar and Jason Bradley

More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month.Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every per-son on Earth, and this number has increased 50 percent from last year!100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Hours Spent Online Per Day

Pia LaPlaca, 10Sibhy Rajesh, 11

Jay Rana, 9Aaliyah Sayed, 10

Kelly Shao, 11Hannah Su, 10Annie Wei, 10Florance Wu, 9

Katherine Wu, 11

How many times have you sent a postcard this year? A real, hard-copy postcard, that is, not the electronic kind that you can send straight from your smartphone. Most likely you have not sent any postcards. From texting to banking, everything we do now is on the Internet, on a smartphone, or some other electronic gadget.

With the speed of innovation in technology, experts are constantly thinking about how communication might evolve. These experts are academics, authors, journalists, and professional speakers. Here are some of their thoughts about what kind of technology the world might see in the future, and how it could affect us.

How about brain-to-machine communication? Lone Frank, a Danish neurologist and journalist, thinks that we might soon be controlling machines just by thinking commands instead of entering them on a pad or speaking them.

David Lemereis, a Dutch freelance technology journalist, agrees with Lone Frank that technology will allow brain-to-machine communication within a few years. Just imagine, you think to your phone, “show me the most visited video on YouTube,” or, “show me the latest Tweets,” and they just pop up on your phone! That surely would not only be easier, but also better than getting grubby fingerprints on your touchscreens!

In ancient Greece, there were people called oracles. These people were allegedly able to tell the future, but we have no proof.

We are, however, free to predict. We can predict that in 10 years’ time, there will be no cell phones. We can predict new technologies. But technology is evolving at such a rapid pace, that what we predict as future technology could already be today’s technology. And every second, so many people are ditching the old things and starting the new. The future of communication is already here.

Reading the Technology Tea Leaves By Seung Yeon Koh and Florance Wu

Logos courtesy of YouTube, Google, Twitter, and Facebook

Courtesy of websuccessteam.com

Courtesy of freevector.com

Scan here to visit the PDS Summer Times blog for more stories, photos, videos, and podcasts!URL: rloewy.edublogs.org