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Erick Peralta's Blog

1/02/2013 Weekly Tech Article

New Year's Eve 2013 marked with Google Doodle

• New Year's Eve 2013 featured in the new Google Doodle. 
• Google has marked the countdown to 2014 with a disco-themed Google Doodle on New Year's Eve. 
• The animation shows the digits marking up 2013 doing a halting jig on a stage under a glitter ball while the number 4 waits to take its place in the line-up.
• Clicking on the Doodle takes the user through to a page of results listing New Year's Eve festivities, news articles, and other results from around the world.
• A further link in the search homepage goes to Google's Zeitgeist 2013 interactive, giving highlights of the year in video, the top 100 searches, search trends, a 2013 gallery and a page of year-in-review lists ranging from celebrities to song lists, recipes, sports teams, and TV show.
• http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/31/new-years-eve-2013-celebrated-with-google-doodle

Do Now: 2013 Reflection/2014 Goals

                                                              2013 Reflection/2014 Goals

2013 was a good year for me because I had a lot of positive things happen to me. I practiced hard for the SAT and ended up getting a good score, 1600. My hard work for preparing for the SAT paid off. Also, I found out that I'm in the 15% of my graduating class, which is great. Also, I got accepted to four colleges so far: Bergen Community College, Montclair, Seton Hall, and Rutgers. My goals for 2014 is to get accepted to my top college TCNJ and continue doing well in school. Also, I hope I get a job because I really need one. 2013 was great, but 2014 will be better!

Social Bookmarking Project

Project Question

1. What's another way we can organize your computers? What about email? Your favorite websites? Your blog posts? RSS feeds?

• Another way we can organize our computers is by having several folders on the desktop, such as for pictures, documents, and videos. It will save us a lot of time to locate what we what when everything is put into a labeled folder.
• We can organize our email by also having individual labeled folders for different email types like school, college, and friends.
• Another way to organize our favorite websites is by adding them to our toolbar on our computers for instant access.
• We can organize our blog posts by categorizing them by assignment type, such as: do now, classwork, homework, and project.
• Another way to organize our RSS feeds is by adding them to our blog as side gadgets for easy access and the latest updates.

12/13/2013 Weekly Tech Article

A Toy Box That's Opened by a Kid's Fingerprint

• Four-year old Ewan Gibson loves toy cars. His dad, Grant, a Scottish Web developer, prefers electronics. Hoping to find common ground---and inspired by Apple's new finger-scanning iPhone---Grant built a biometric lockbox for his son's cars.
• He installed a sensor that scans fingers in the lid of the toy box. The data is sent to an Arduino microcontroller, which, when it recognizes one of Ewan's prints, unlocks the lid. Although Ewan is more interested in the cars than the box, it does fascinate him: As he says, his "fingers are magic."
• http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/toy-box-thats-opened-kids-fingerprint

12/06/2013 Weekly Tech Article

Hummingbirds and Robots?

• In order to design and create better flying robots, a team at Stanford University needed to see things our pitiful human eyes can't---like how exactly does a hummingbird hover? So they grabbed a high-speed camera and went in search for birds.
• Birds are exceedingly fast-moving animals, especially the various species of hummingbird, moving far too fast for the human eye to see naturally. Luckily, our human brains and hands have managed to invent amazing high-speed cameras like the Phantom, with which we can capture fireworks, smash TVs, and watch puppies roll around all in crazy motion, at thousands of frames per second. The Stanford team aimed a Phantom at various birds to see how they fly, and came away with some surprising insights.
• Hummingbirds, for example, appear to do a very fast, very small shake along their spines, sort of like a wet dog shaking off---except in mid-flight. This has never been seen before, but could give teams attempting to create flying robots new clues as to how nature deals with the challenge of flight.
• http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/super-slow-motion-camera-shows-bird-flight-youve-never-seen-it?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=8&con=firstever-superslowmotion-video-of-hummingbirds-hovering

Do Now: 12/3/13

Twitter & Instagram in Education

• Social networking sites, such as Twitter & Instagram can be beneficial to use in education for several reasons. It can be used by the educator to post homework reminders or helpful links to study for upcoming exams. Most teenagers are always using twitter and instagram for example, so they will see the updates by their educator. Also using social networking sites will help improve students' grades because there will be constant reminders by their educator on exams or homework; they will not be able to say they forgot the homework or didn't know they had an exam that day. Twitter and Instagram can surprisingly be beneficiall in education.