Excel

I have had a pretty good experience with excel so far. I had some basic skills and knowledge of excel before coming into this class but there have been a few things that I learned. I plan on majoring in Bussiness Administration with a concentration in Finance and excel will be very useful. The calculations it can perform along with the chart making will be extremely helpful. I also plan to use the amortization chart we learned how to use in class. This will be good to use when I buy a house. I will also use excel to keep track of my finances and budgets. The only thing I dislike about the program is it gets pretty repetitive.

Internet Ethics

I chose the picture of the Lebanese city full of smoke after an Israeli air raid. This photograph came from Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj. The picture was manipulated by the photographer adding more smoke rising from the buildings. I think he did this to make the Israeli bombings appear more severe than what they really were. The manipulation had the potential to be very harmful. With the photographer creating more smoke, it makes the destruction look worse, making Israel look like it is bombing everything in Lebanon. This could have sparked more anti-Israel feelings in the Middle East and cause war to break out.

I chose this video because it shows the many ways a photo can be redone. Tim Lynch, a professional photographer/retoucher, gives an inside look at what really happens. According to him, 99.9% of all photographs of celebrities are retouched or altered in some way. They want to be viewed as perfect, which in reality, is impossible.

Facebook can be Dangerous

Many teens and young adults today have a profile on some sort of social networking site, whether it’s MySpace, Facebook, etc. These are making it easier to connect to large amounts of people faster and faster through the internet. In a way, people can get to know us through social networking sites without even meeting us in person. Think of how many times you go to look up people on Facebook. You may have never seen them before, but you can already gain an idea about what type of person they are based on their profile. Businesses do routine background checks on applicants today, and with social networking being so popular, you can guarantee that they will look at your profile. We, unknowingly, are forfeiting some professionalism to express ourselves in a good social climate. I personally keep a very close watch on my Facebook pictures, friends, likes, and statuses, but more needs to be done. You have to control your actions outside of school. I also try and make sure that none of my friends post pictures on Facebook that could hurt my future. There are many cases where pictures are posted on the internet without a person’s knowledge, and once they are out there, they are there to stay. What makes it worse is that EVERYONE has access to it.
I think that the applicant should have been turned down, although it was not ethical of his friend to post those pictures without his knowledge. The whole situation could have been avoided if the applicant had not partaken in any illegal activities. While it was taken in his junior year of college, once the picture was posted on the internet it is forever there. He was breaking the law, plain and simple. He may not have gotten in trouble for it then, but justice was served. The applicant’s friend should have known better than to post a picture that would hurt his so called “friend”. Why would you ever post pictures like that on facebook? While it was extremely unethical to do this and detrimental to the applicant, the fault still lies with the applicant for participating in illegal activities. The law firm was not in the wrong at all and I believe it was perfectly legal to look at the applicants Facebook. Facebook is a public forum where everyone has the freedom to express themselves in any way that they choose to. Since it is public, you have to be careful of how you portray yourself. The information of the photograph should probably not have been shared with the applicant as it may be against company policy. Then again, I would want to know why I didn’t get the job. Even more, I would want to know if there were such pictures of me on the internet.
“The ''self-image'' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.” – Maxwell Maltz (Thinkexist.com)
This couldn’t be more true. What image we put on Facebook and other social networking sites is often the image seen by others. Be careful.

Copyright and Creative Commons

This past class Jason L. Hardin, the Manager of Access Services here at Trinity, came to talk to us about copyright laws. So what exactly is copyright? A copyright protects someone’s intellectual property. It is a government protection and is a crime for copyright infringement. A copyright kicks in when a thought is put into a tangible, fixed medium. One issue that is a concern for many colleges across the country is file sharing. Students often use file sharing to attain free music, movies, TV shows, etc. Now there is nothing wrong with file sharing, it is perfectly legal, but using file sharing to access stuff that is not yours (i.e. free music) and you have not paid for is illegal. There are people today whose sole job is to seek out copyright infringement and illegal file sharing. They can look at a computer’s IP address, which is an eleven to twelve digit number that uniquely identifies a computer, and track down the person committing the crime. You can then get slapped with a lawsuit, and those are not cheap. They can cost thousands of dollars and around $750 per song. Bottom line is it is not worth it. You may get away with it for awhile, but if you are caught it could cost thousands of dollars.

Copyright and Creative Commons by Zach Lambert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

My Trinity Network Diagram

This shows the Trinity Network located on campus. It provides a basic layout and explains the function of each building involved on campus.