Blog Post #2

   

Supreme Court

 I was always intrigued by how the Supreme Court worked. Why was it so Superior to other courts? Were the worst cases of murder only allowed in the Supreme Court? Where did it Come from? All of these questions would pop into my head whenever I thought about the Supreme Court. Eventually, I learned that the Supreme Court was created by the U.S. Constitution in 1789. It made up of nine justices who will serve as a justice until they die or retire. The main idea of the Supreme Court is to have the largest jurisdiction over all and any laws. The Supreme Court also has the power to check on if a law is constitutional and the court can watch over the other two branches of government as well. They have a large role in the United States government and have a lot of jobs to do.

    The Supreme Courts' first meeting was held on February 2nd, 1790. Although they never heard a case in its first term, it was still an important term to set up the organizational workings of the Supreme Court. The first actual court decision made by the justices was held on August 3rd, 1791. The court case was West v. Barnes and was a financial dispute against a farmer who owned family money too. 

An interesting thing I learned about the Supreme Court was from History.com. They explained how "For more than 100 years after the foundation of the Supreme Court, the justices were required to hold circuit court twice a year in each judicial circuit". This means that for twice a year the Supreme Courts would have to travel around the States to get from case to case. This became very hard to do with the addition of new states in America and the very little transportation the U.S. had that they abolished this rule in 1891.

In Conclusion, the Supreme Court is one of the most necessary branches of the government. These 3 branches need to stay in order to not fall because they all keep each other in balance. Although we cannot vote injustices to the Supreme Court it is still our power to keep the Supreme Court going and keeping our government in balance.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/opinion/supreme-court-elections.html

Blog Post #3

               Black Lives Matter

    Back in May 2020, the tragic death of George Floyd caused protests all around the world against racism. Flash forward to February 2021, in the article I read, it explains that the BLM movement is receiving a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination. This is obviously happy news and amazing, however, not everything that came out of the Black Lives Matter movement was good. One of the 6 freedoms listed in the first amendment is the right to peacefully assemble. This is the individual right or ability of people to come together and collectively express their shared ideas. This is what most of the BLM protests were like.

 

The protests that were peaceful and made to bring attention to the problem of racial inequality are what are nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Another freedom that is included by the first amendment is the right to petition the government. This grants people the freedom to stand up and speak up about injustices they feel are occurring, and also it grants the power to help change those injustices. These rights are allowed because the government needs to know what is on the peoples minds and what they are fighting for. These two rights that I just brought up support peacefully speaking your mind, not violent actions.

 

The first amendment does not cover violent action or speech that can cause incitement to violence.  This means that the peaceful protests were amazing enough to get nominated for a Noble Peace Prize, because the marching is welcomed and protected. As soon as the protests got violent and the looting and destroying of property started, it was no longer protected. The First Amendment does not protect actions of violence whatsoever. 

 

https://oracle.newpaltz.edu/blm-receives-nobel-peace-prize-nomination/

 

notes on technology- presentations

Presentation Notes

Group Two

 Printing press: Device for applying pressure to an inked surface. It first came out in 1440. The inventor was Johannes Gutenberg. By 1450, they had a printing press machine already perfected. 

VCR: is a device that uses videocassettes for recording and playing back videotapes. Sony released the first home model in 1964 which then sparked other companies to join the VCR revolution. VCR was popular until 2003 when DVD took over. 

Netflix: Founded in 1997. Easy to use and does not have commercials. One negative is that we binge-watch which is not good for our health.

Camera Phone: The first one was in 2002. Really easy to use if you are not a trained photographer. Phone cameras are very small so the flash does not look that good. 

Twitter: Founded in 2006. You can receive the latest news quickly. 

Group Three: 

Homing Pigeon: Ancient Greeks were the first ones to use them to deliver messages. some people still raise Homing pigeons today. Communication source throughout the centries. 

Cameras: Discovered the pinhole camera. After exposure was discovered, the Daguerreotypes and Calotypes were invented. Kodak and film are still popular today because they have film and they have to develop. 

Cassette Tapes: Developed in Belgium. It was popular because of how convenient and small it was to just carry around. It is very cheap and easy to record on them. They are considered vintage. 

SMS Texting: Short messaging service. The first text was sent in 1992. The Growth was very very small. By 2001, it started getting a little bit more popular. 

First iPod: Apple was very focused on getting ahead of other companies. Released in 2001. It was the start of the smartphone. 

Group 4:

Paper: In 1690 the first us papermill was created in Pennsylvania. At first, anything that anyone wrote on paper they were taxed on. Sharing info about the war through the newspaper when it became popular. 

Movies: 1939 was when color was really introduced and everybody was in awe of it. The top-grossing movies were always summer blockbusters like jaws from the 70s. 

Television: Started getting more popular in the late 20s. NBC had to sell one of their very big networks because they were getting too much power. 

World Wide Web: You would have to go from computer to computer to get different information. They eventually created a universal web that allowed you to get all info on one computer. They decided to make it free so that everyone can get to the internet for free. 

Youtube: it was originally supposed to be a dating website where you can post videos of yourself. It failed. Nobody could really find videos online of events so they decide to change it to a video platform. It quickly rose. 2007 was when you can get paid as a youtube. 

Group 5:

Headphones: They were first used by telephone operators, they started as big headphones with wires and as time went on they started getting used to music because music therapy was introduced which eventually led to headphones getting smaller and wireless. 

Facebook: It originally started as a dating website where you would rate people's faces. It got shut down pretty fast. It was made for college students but quickly spread to high school students. It eventually became where you can post pictures of your life and create a timeline, Facebook and Instagram join together. 

Group 6:

Fax machine: It started out as the electric printing telegraph in 1843, it was raining and just really copied the lines at first, fast forward to 1982- a standard fax machine cost 20,000 dollars, about a second later in 1996, the first internet fax was made. In 2010, fax apps were made through your phone.

Google Search Blog Post #6

 

How Google Search Came to Be

Google Search was started as a plain old research project by college kids. Their names are Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Larry was considering Stanford for grad school, and Sergey was assigned to show him around. Larry decided to go to Stanford, and the next year, he and Sergey formed a partnership.  They decided to try and create a search engine from their dorm rooms that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the world wide web. The original name for this search engine was Backrub. This name actually has a story behind it. It came from the Algorithm generated ranking for how many "backlinks" a page has. A backlink is a link from one website to another. 

The Backrub search engine worked on the Stanford servers for more than a year before it eventually clogged up the bandwidth and was forced to move. Because of this, Larry decided to come up with a different name. Larry was talking with his office mates (at this point, the search engine was seemingly getting more and more successful), and his office mate Sean Anderson came up with the name googolplex. This was based on the large number of googol. Larry shortened it to just googol. Sean wrote it on the whiteboard and accidentally misspelled "googol" for "Google," and that is when the name Google.com formed.

Over the next few years, Google was getting more popular and gaining attention, especially by Silicon Valley investors. By August of 1998,  Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote Larry and Sergey a check for $100,000, and Google Inc. formed. Andy was so confident in google, that he wrote the check after seeing a quick demo at Stanford. Google's first headquarters was in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. While in this location, Google hired its first employee, Craige Silverstein, who actually ended up staying with the company for 10 years. As years followed, Google decided to expand their company by hiring engineers and building a sales team. Google outgrew the garage and moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California. 

In 2001, other improvements to Google kept it on the rise. It included multilingualism, international celebrations, and Google toolbar, which is a plugin that allows the user to search without opening the homepage. Google's popularity was growing, along with their staff. By 2004, it had more than 425 million users. In that same year, Google came up with Google Scholar, which is a free web-based service that indexes the full text, or metadata, of scholarly literature across many publishing formats and disciplines. In 2005, Google Maps was launched, with satellite imagery and even directions. From 2006 to 2014, Google translate, Google Chrome, Google Classroom, and Google photos were launched, which are used by many people to this day.

 

 

Now that all the background information is out of the way, it is time to explain how the Google Search engine actually works. Google uses software that is called "web crawlers." When we search for something on Google, crawlers look for pages that are the newest and updated. Google stores these URLS, in a big list. The next step is indexing. Google visits the pages that are learned about by crawling and analyzes them. The information is then stored in the Google Index, a huge database on many computers. The last step is serving search results. When a user performs a Google search, Google determines the highest quality results. The "best" results have many factors, that include the user's location, language, device, and previous queries. Today, Google handles trillions of searches each year. Google is now the 4th company to hit a market cap of 1 trillion dollars.

 

 Digital customers now cannot imagine the world without Google. From finding the answer to a question, to staying updated on the latest world news, we rely on Google for almost everything. Google has even changed shopping.Google is one single platform that enables you to run all the shopping websites. You can look for any desired online shopping store to make your purchase from the comfort of your own house. We can even find our careers on Google. In the world of constant connectivity today, we can easily find out about suitable job profiles as per our qualification or work experience. Google also offers you many great opportunities to promote and market your specific products or services. Major companies also now rely on google to make money and use google itself to make their products, services, and voices easiy searchable online. 

References

https://interestingengineering.com/almost-everything-you-need-to-know-about-googles-history

https://about.google/our-story/#:~:text=The%20Google%20story%20begins%20in,assigned%20to%20show%20him%20around.&text=They%20called%20this%20search%20engine,was%20renamed%20Google%20(phew).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2014.995359