GSSE Blog Daily: Katie Lam

  American Energy Use: The Effects of Technological Consumerism Recently on a business tour, my tour group was asked the question: Is the world getting better or worse? With the slide being filled with pictures of SpaceX rockets, satellites, and futuristic electric vehicles, my group and I all subconsciously understood that this question was in the context of whether or not technological advancement was for the betterment of humankind. While the internet allows us to learn faster than ever, cars allow us to experience mobile freedom, and indoor AC allows us to be more comfortable than ever, these technological advancements promote us not only to consume a detrimental amount of energy, but also to become concerningly comfortable in excessive energy and technological consumption.   But that is not to say technological progression and how rapidly it has progressed is not amazing in itself; it is amazing how quickly humans have been able to develop into the world we know today. Technologi

  Guest Speaker: Dr. Schuman Today we got firsthand experience in creating data for a machine learning activity. We visited a site where we were able to feed information through series of pictures of either a facial expression, a hand signal, or certain objects. With this information, our machine was able to learn what traits were associated with certain items through an accumulation of mathematical formulas. Additionally we also got to play with an app that learned from other people's drawings and was able to complete our drawings and portray certain prompts (such as dog, cat, mermaid, lighthouse etc).  Overall it was an engaging experience that allowed us to learn about machine learning data and experience collecting data ourselves.  Pictured: Training Data of My Classmate

  What is a ChatBot? A ChatBot is an automated response system that can respond to text messages. Whether it's tech support or frequently asked questions about a certain topic, chatbots are programmed to be capable in answering these messages.  Python Code In this project, I made a bot that could answer simple questions one might have about climbing. Simple questions for total non-climbers like 'What is climbing?' was included in this code. Facebook ChatBot On a similar theme, I made a rock climbing FAQ bot that had premade questions available for my user on my Rock Climbing FAQ page specifically catered towards beginners who wanted to learn more about how to improve, how to start, basic climbing terms etc.  Flow Struggles: A flow is a series of steps a chatbot can follow to respond to messengers. However, sometimes it can get stuck. Sometimes it won't know the answer, and sometimes it might not flow. When creating my chatbot at first, my user had no way to come back to

  Ijams Nature Park Notes: Indigenous/grounded view: The balance of nature upkeeps the balance of traits and balance of life and death in natural biodiversity.  Class Thoughts: It was interesting to see the impacts of this activity on myself and heartwarming to hear the shared similar feelings the rest of the class had about this activity as well. From observing things we would have never taken the time to watch to being phone free, it was a shared moment of mindfulness and awareness for everyone, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was also enlightening to see how our topics in class connected to everyone's experience of 'observing' our surroundings with human lenses (Inchworm crossing the table, caterpillar climbing to a seemingly unreachable destination). 

  Data Visualization: McDonalds Dashboard I learned how to create a simple dashboard that consisted of sales, charts, and customer satisfactions. With this visualization, users could easily navigate between pages, see raw data compared to visualized data, and have easy access to contact information. With this dashboard data can be more easily understood and more easily analyzed whether it's for company improvement or company stats.  What is AI?     AI works based on data that it is taught whether it is text from a news outlet or a collection of art pieces. With this data, it can use its taught information to provide responses to prompts or stitch together words or images that correlate with the prompt. This technology can be used to generate all sorts of media whether it's a story, a summary, an image, or art. How Humans Determined Who Would Survive vs Code: Similarly to AI, we were given a set of videos to be our clues/our human "data." Based on these videos, we gath

Discussion Record: Not economically realistic Would broaden class gap. Cheaply produced meat is already a commodity, and restricting it to only high quality/organic meat would deepen issue 'We are in too deep' Need to supply large population and high American consumerism demand  Other opinion: But it's unethical? Are there any other options? CAFOs might have to be considered a necessary evil