Self-Driving cars are rapidly advancing in development in today’s world. Ideally, they will make roads safer, as well as provide sustainable and affordable transportation to both owners and those in need of transportation. Using a plethora of cameras and sensors, they can determine optimal and safe driving routes in order to create more efficient driving … More Self-Driving Cars: The Future or a Safety Hazard?
Trolling deals with individuals who post inflammatory, off-topic, or extraneous comments or content within online communities in order to provoke emotional responses from a particular or general audience. However, I believe there are two sides to every coin. In one sense, there is the harmless form of trolling, which usually involves some sort of trickery … More Trolling on the Internet
The privacy paradox is a hot topic of late. Basically, this phenomenon refers to the fact that even though so many people are up in arms about privacy, their behaviors don’t match their concerns. After listening to the Privacy Paradox series of podcasts from Note to Self, I have given my own technological habits some … More The Privacy Paradox
“Fake News” has become nothing short of a hot topic over the last 6 months or so. Although this existed long before the 2016 Presidential Election, it has certainly gotten more of the spotlight as a results. As Max Read’s “Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook” describes it, fake news “stories that are alternately made … More America Runs on “Fake News”
The concept of corporate personhood deals with the fact that corporations (large or small) have some, but not all, of the legal rights as those held by a natural, physical human person. This allows companies to be treated as individual entities in the legal world. Some examples of this include the ability to sue and be … More Corporate Personhood
The capabilities of cloud computing have dramatically changed the sharing and storage of information across internet. It has opened up a world of possibilities for a number of industries in the technological world by allowing the storage of millions of files and data on a various servers. For example, I am constantly using the cloud on a … More The World of Cloud Computing
Edward Snowden has been a hot topic of discussion for the past few years. To be honest, after reading some of these articles, there are a lot of things he exposed that I really didn’t know about. When I think of the Snowden case, I think about the NSA tapping into phones and web servers … More Snowden: Hero or Traitor?
After watching Hidden Figures, I have had some time to reflect on some of the racial and gender controversies people faced not only in the 1960s, but also how issues of this nature still exist today. A podcast discussion and review of the film by Michael Hutchison and myself can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/michael-hillmer/hiddenfigures_reviewpodcast. We discussed a … More ‘Hidden Figures’ and the Obstacles of Females in STEM
The Challenger explosion can be seen as one of the worst disasters in the history of NASA. Not only were 7 lives lost, including Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space, but it was also a tragedy that could have almost certainly been avoided. What gets worse is that the fact … More Whistleblowing and the Challenger Disaster
“I came here for the diversity.” This is a recurring inside joke that students make across the University of Notre Dame. Even the annual Keenan revue made a point to have jokes regarding the demographics of our school. The reality is that diversity is a much more widespread issue, particularly in the programming community. Two … More Diversity in the Programming Community
Michael Hillmer 