Hanford & the Atomic Age

I feel as though I can bring a lot to the table on this week's subject of the Atomic Age.  I'd like to center my focus on the Hanford site in Richland, Washington.  I was raised my entire life in a small town right next to Richland.  My grandpa worked at Hanford, my dad works at Hanford, and for the past seven years or so, I've worked in a national laboratory right next to Hanford and I've been to the site many times for various work tasks over the years.

Hanford helped produce approximately 2/3 of the total plutonium in our nation for approximately 40 years.  The government opened the area and brought in approximately 50,000 people.  This established what is now known as the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick).  I highly recommend watching this seven minute BBC documentary on the town's pride in nuclear past.

Currently and for the next twenty years or so extensive cleanup is being conducted on the site.  Nuclear waste was stored in multiple single-shelled tanks under the ground in the area.  In August of 1991 an official report was sent to the Government regarding those tanks leaking radioactive waste into the environment.  Now each of those tanks have been replaced with double-shelled tanks and the waste transported into them.  Current research being done for the cleanup at the moment is the science of vitrification.  Vitrification is essentially turning unstable nuclear waste mostly in the liquid form and solidifying it into a stable, black glossy glass that can then be held and played with or whatever else you want to do with it.  I've held chunks of vitrified nuclear waste in my own hands!  Hopefully none of you say "so that explains a lot."

The Hanford area is depicted in the image highlighted below.  As you can see it's clearly a dead area and is somewhat surrounded by agriculture

In the image below (taken from Google maps), you can see the roads and buildings which once existed at Hanford.  These have long been torn down and cleanup continues at the Hanford Site.  

This next image shows both the National Laboratory(The green area at the south portion of the picture) where I work and a small section of Hanford (North on the picture).  This particular segment of Hanford is called the 300 area and within the last five years, the majority of the buildings you can somewhat see at the top of the image are completely taken down.  I've helped clean out two to three of them and there's a lot of history in them as well as hazardous materials.

As for my experience growing up near Hanford, we never really worried about the radioactivity.  Most of the people in my home town works there and everyone is comfortable with everything.  We had a pet cat show up at our house years ago and we nick-named her Hanford because she had three extra toes on each foot.  We liked to say she got a taste of the radioactive waste which ultimately caused her mutation.  Glowing green and being radioactive is tossed around light-heartily by the community.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding Hanford.  I'd love to answer to the extend that I know.

Peer blog review "Hakuna Matata" by Eric Collyer

I recently reviewed another student's blog within my Digital Civilization class and wanted to highlight his posted blog entries.

The student's name is Eric Collyer and his wordpress site is hakuna matata from Kenya to Provo.


Eric has done an excellent job at tying together digital concepts with human behavior as well as tying together on occasion those concepts with the historical elements of our class.  

Most of his posts are short and to the point, which is nice, and he shows he has a lot of knowledge with the technological aspects of the class via the tools he illustrates and discusses.

Eric has personalized his blog by writing about personal experiences such as the Asking for a Date entry and adding a relevant comic strip which came to his mind after a class discussions.  Regarding the Consume, Create, and Connect aspects of the class, it's rather difficult to judge and review some of these, but overall Eric has shown he has consumed the weekly topics appropriately and has adequately explained various ways in which he has connected with others on our class subjects via Skype & Google Voice at a minimum.  The Create genre could use a little improvement as does my own blog, but overall I think he has done an excellent job with his reporting for the month of October and beginning of November.

Reflective Blog Post II

This post is to represent how I have viewed my recent progress and where I stand in regards to my Digital Civilization course objectives & requirements.

Historical Content:

I feel as though I've taken a larger step at understanding and researching the historical aspects of our weekly topics. Rather than dive into the breadth of a topic (which is rather boring and overwhelming) I chose to select a specific individual, concept, or theme and dive into that for as much information as I could reasonably justify with my schedule. After gaining an interest in the work they spent their lives doing, I would then have the motivation and drive to do additional research on the random questions that came to me pertaining to the overall subject.

Computing Concepts and Digital Culture:

I've found it very fascinating to begin to relate the digital culture to reality. Identifying various case studies in class and on my own time have shown many similarities with how people behave and what influences them to act. Even though I'm majoring in a very technical major (Information Systems), I'm still constantly learning new tools and of new sites that change the way businesses and organizations operate. Often times these tools enable them to gain unimaginable success if they were to attempt to pursue their interests on their own within their own community.

Self-Directed Learning (utilizing the three Cs of Consume, Create, and Connect):

Consume- One of the main areas I've evolved my research for finding the very basic information on an individual is not through Wikipedia, but rather through Prezi.com now. I've found that there are many presentations publicly available that only highlight the main accomplishments and milestones of a person's life and leave out the excessive in-depth analysis. This has saved me considerable time and from there I tend to find one category or bullet point that interests me and I dive into that more through other sites and try to find documentaries, books, and simply other sites that have already explained the given situation/event.

Create- I've generated some analysis of topics covered in class via animoto.com and prezi.com. If I were to select the area needing improvement most it would definitely be this one as I pictured in my mind that this category directly applied to our digital labs and not really to the historical content of our class.

Connect- Along with focusing my efforts more on the historical content this last month or so, I've also worked more on the networking ("Connect") aspect of the class. The digital tool "NetworkedBlogs", which integrates your blog posts seamlessly with your Facebook profile page, has really enabled my posts to be viewed by a much larger audience. I've received many more comments (sometimes via my Facebook wall rather than directly on the blog entry) that have generated discussions and thoughts from others. In the process of networking, I connected with an individual who writes on occasion posts on her Hubpage. She suggested her site and later followed up with a few messages containing supporting links to a topic I wrote an blog entry on. Overall, the Connect aspect has considerably improved since the last reflective blog post.

Overall, I feel as though I'm better equipped to efficiently and effectively do research on various subjects. I'm seeing the value of venturing outside of a simple Google and/or a Wikipedia search and I can find what I'm looking for much quicker than crossing my fingers and hoping that the first ten sites Google pulls from my original search contains exactly what I'm looking for.

John Maynard Keynes Economy & Governments

I still find it very interesting that very often the topics being covered in my digital civilization class are being taught to some degree in another one of my classes.  For this particular week one of our two main topics is on the man John Maynard Keynes, an economist.  His discoveries identify the need of government intervention in certain economic situations in order for a country to not lose all control of its system.

Here's a short breakdown of who John Keynes was and his accomplishments :

• He was born in 1883 at Cambridge England, where he later taught
• He was a British economist who spent his career amongst England's most intellectual individuals
• He was appointed director of the bank of England
• One of his large accomplishments was he helped form capitalism in the 20th Century
• He actively participated and aided the British in both world wars.

Keynes theories gained so much popularity that they developed into a category of their own, now known as Keynesian economics.  Wikipedia states that "it (Keynesian economics) argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes and therefore advocates active policy responses by the public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle."

President Obama has been putting a lot of money into the economy while he has been in office.  His mentality of stimulating the economy fits nicely into Keynes principles.

In my Managerial Economics class we've been discussing the moral hazards of government intervention regarding company bailouts classified as "too big to fail."  When a company reaches this classification and fails, a domino effect begins to take place and the hundreds of businesses which relied on the success of the large company now also start to go under.   Companies that know they're ensured to stay running via government intervention have a large tendency to make more radical  and risky decisions.  Doing so may result in very large returns, yet the contrary exists where it could also put them under very quickly.  

Remember the year 2009 and watching the stock market plummet from approx 12,000 to less than 6000 in less than half a year?  Remember all the news articles about AIG bailouts, Bear Sterns, or the housing mortgage issues?  If you'd like to watch a really well put-together PBS video on what caused the economy to fall so rapidly as it did, click here.  The video is approximately an hour long.  It discusses the very essential need of government intervention and how the public understood and interpreted its actions.

Here's a fun music video of Keynesian Economic principles put into a rap if you're interested. 

Stealing a blogger's story

I was reading through some news headlines and found one titled:

Lifting of blogger's story triggers online furor

In short a magazine took/stole/"lifted" another blogger's story and made some changes and then published it.  The author who came to find out about it sent a letter of complaint and was responded to in a very unprofessional manner.   The response is below.  The author of the blog's name is Monica.

"But honestly Monica, the Web is considered 'public domain' and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offense and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!"
 

This generated all sorts of traffic to the magazine's facebook page where fans went from 12 to over 5000 in just few days.  Everyone going to the page is leaving humorous slams against the magazine named Cook Source.  

Moral of the story, always be professional because you never know if something you write will unite the masses to savage your reputation on the internet. 


This isn't the end.  The editor of the magazine attempted to start up a new facebook page but it was quickly identified.  After publishing this post  I came across article after article talking about this whole mess.  People have even gone as far as creating webpages addressing it!  Oh, this all went down last Thursday.  Within a matter of only 2 days, tens of thousands have heard of the unfortunate blogger and how her work was taken from her.

Life of a programmer pioneer

I spent quite some time doing research on the life of one of the first pioneers in computer programming.
Her name is Jean Jennings Bartik.

Jean graduated high school at a young age of 16 and was the only female student in her degree of Mathematics at Northwest Missouri State University.  She was recruited by the US Army in 1945 as a human "computer" to calculate the firing trajectories of artillery during the WWII.

To bring the time into perspective,

• 15 cents for a gallon of gas 
• $1000 for a brand new car
• 40 cents = minimum wage
• $200 a month was the average salary of a worker
• There were only 5000 television sets in the entire nation

Jean was assigned to work with another lady named Betty and if they had any questions, they were told to ask their mentor (John) whenever he was in his office and they did so quite a bit.  Jean describes Betty as a woman who could analyze and solve problems in her sleep and that often she would show up the next morning with a solution to a former problem and most of the time she'd be right.

The women were not recognized for their many accomplishments for many years.  It wasn't until a friend put their story into a Wall Street Journal article that people began to recognize these women and Jean for their contributions to programming.

I don't want to make this too long, but an excerpt from one of Jean's published works The Technical Camelot states the following to illustrate her working situation:
"There once was a congenial spot
where ideas flowed so free-l-ly
and designs were done so speed-l-ly
where all them forgot
frontiers weren't pierced so eas-i-ly
No one believed in not
in Technical Camelot.

If you're interested in watching an hour long presentation/interview with Jean Jennings Bartik taken in 2008, click here to watch this video.

Jean worked with the mentality that nothing is impossible.  She's definitely a true pioneer in computer programming.

Freud, Analyze this

One of the weekly topics we're covering in my western civilization class is Psychology and we're studying a little about Sigmund Freud.  Two things come to mind when I hear the name Freud,

1) My psychology class in high school with Mr. Jones, and

2) the song "Die Another Day" by Madonna (she has a catchy line saying, Sigmund Freud, analyze this, analyze this, analyze this.)  

However, on a more serious note, one of our class readings was an excerpt on one of Freud's writings and I wanted to expand a little more on subject.  I encourage you to red the excerpt.  One of the views to explain the reasons for the aggressiveness of the natural man is the concept of private property.   

  "The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and waited the temptation to ill-treat his neighbor; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor."  The concept seems sound and I believe there is definitely truth behind its meaning.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Ladder-day Saints, our religion believes that when Christ comes down to earth again, we will live by a law where everybody will have all things in common, and wealth, space, necessities will be distributed according to family/individual needs.  Poverty would essentially disappear and there wouldn't be categorizations of different nations such as "3rd world countries". 

After thinking about this another thing was brought to my attention.  A memory of a college class discussion came to mind where the topic was on patents, health care, and innovation within the technology spectrum was brought up.  In short, people work hard to find, develop, and address current world problems for the sole purpose of making a profit (the American way).  When you pay a doctor the same salary as you would a person with the same life situation, but they only have obtained a high school education, what would motivate anyone to attend years and years of schooling if it doesn't benefit them?!  Why spend millions in research to discover a new medicine if you won't at least get paid for your hours and hours of tedious labor and time above and beyond that of your simple-life neighbor?

Let me know what your thoughts are!  Oh, and I'm not huge Madonna fan I'd like to add.  That particular song was simply abused over the radio by being played way too much years ago!