CST 300 week 7

Part One

    My group planned the video project through discord. We collaborated and assigned tasks by sending messages in our group chat, since some of us were too busy for a group call. Rene drafted an outline for our video to follow and we each volunteered to cover topics on the outline. Our current plan is to record our own videos for each topic. After this we will need to figure out how we will edit the videos together. This process has been smooth so far, and I think we will continue to work on projects this way for now.

Part Two

    This week, I was able to learn/refresh on some information about presentations. Visual aids can improve a presentation or ruin a presentations depending on how they are used. I think it is important to use visual aids that are visually appealing, but do not distract the audience. This information along with the rubric for the video project should help our group create an informative video that can also keep the attention of the target audience.

    The first ted talk video I watched was by Chris Nowinski, and it was about concussions and CTE. He was a former college football player and wrestler in the WWE who suffered a severe concussion from being kicked in the head. Nowinski suffers through depression and other cognitive issues from his injury and these symptoms were similar to the symptoms people diagnosed with CTE had experienced. At this time, CTE was ignored by the media and this led Nowinski to form the Concussion Legacy Foundation and the brain donation registry. This organization partnered with Boston University to collect brains of people exposed to contact sports to conduct research on CTE. They found that out of 111 NFL players examined, 110 had CTE. To this day there is no cure and no way to diagnose CTE in living people. Nowinski strives to find treatments for this disease and to find ways to reduce brain trauma.

    Max Hawkins was a software engineer at Google in San Francisco. Hawkins read abut predictive analytics and learned that if you took someones GPS trace and provided it to a machine learning algorithm, a computer could predict where someone would be the next day. This bothered him that even if he tried to go somewhere new, it was predictable to a computer. This led Hawkins to make an app to decide where he should go. It picks a random place to go and calls an Uber to drop you off there. He used this app and discovered new things about San Francisco that he would never had learned about because of his preferences. Hawkins decided to apply this idea to other aspects of his life, making apps that randomized other things in his life. He eventually created an app to decide where he should live in the world for a few months at a time. Despite this, Hawkins found his activities were not truly random. He was doing random activities from a list that was not random. What Hawkins addresses through this video is how people become defined by their environment and the structure of society. He encourages the viewers to live outside of their comfort and to be experimental so that they are not controlled so easily.