Vanessa's CS 1300 Blog

Advice for Next Semester's Students

2009-12-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

CSCI 1300 is a great class and you will learn a lot. Here is my advice for doing well in the class. Start your assigments early! Sometimes they end up being more time-consuming than expected. Also, sometimes you will want to take notes in class because Ms. Belisle will go over processes that require many steps and you won't remember them later. And finally, have fun! You will get to do many assignments that require creativity.

Creating a Picture that Lies

2009-11-11T22:33:00.000-08:00

I wanted to create a humorous and political picture that lies, and decided to look up politicians. I came across pictures of Senator McCain and Sarah Palin, and saw numerous examples of manipulated pictures and political cartoons reflecting the thoughts and propaganda of non-supporters during the 2012 presidential campaign. The photo of Palin originated from The Swamp at swamppolitics. com, a political blog from the Chicago Tribune's Washington D.C. Bureau, and shows Palin in Alaska. The highway sign came from Google Images. By pasting the manipulated highway sign in the background and blending it in, I attempted to highlight the unintelligent comments the governor made in an interview with Katie Couric about her foreign policy experience resulting from Russia's proximity to Alaska. Because I intended the manipulation to make a political statement and evoke amusement, I don't don't believe it was harmful. I used the clone tool to create fake snow within the picture. I also used the lasso, eraser, and text tools to work on the sign.

PowerPoint Presentations

2009-11-04T13:02:00.000-08:00

Of the PowerPoint presentations I saw in class, Anthony Cockrell and Garrett Biel gave my two favorite presentations. I enjoyed Anthony’s because he included a visual with every type of engineering he discussed. I also liked that he had a list and pictures of famous engineers or well-known people with an engineering background. I didn’t realize that some of them were engineers because they chose different career paths. The design was consistent among the slides and he also added a cool sound effect. Garrett Biel’s presentation was quite entertaining. I enjoyed the pictures of the airline he included, and using a shot of the inside of the airplane made for a great background. Before this presentation, I knew that Southwest was a profitable airline offering cheap flights, but I didn’t know how they were achieving this. Now I understand some of the ideas Southwest implemented to become so successful. Overall, I found these to be the best, but I am glad I got to see so many presentations on such a wide variety of subjects.

PowerPoint

2009-11-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

The articles about PowerPoint presentations put many of the frustrations I have felt while viewing a PowerPoint based presentation into words. The most annoying thing I have witnessed over and over during PowerPoint presentations is someone simply reading the text on slides word for word. Though I have greatly improved on my presentations since I first became familiar with PowerPoint in middle school, the articles also showed me that there are various aspects of my presentations that I can still work on. For one, I didn’t realize that using clipart is considered a PowerPoint sin. I also thought that some of the background templates provided by the program were pretty decent but I guess it makes sense that audiences have seen them all by now. I’m really glad this class is covering this topic because I have seen a lot of bad PowerPoint presentations. Hopefully, I will see fewer of them in the future.

Here are five guidelines that I think are important:

1) Never just read the text on your slides out loud.

2) Make sure everything on your slides is readable. This includes choosing appropriate color combinations.

3) Keep your slides clutter-free and consistent. It looks unprofessional to have different slide themes in a single presentation.

4) Make cue-cards so you don’t ever have to turn your back on your audience to read your presentation to keep yourself on track.

5) Use real photos instead of clipart.

CLT Field Trip

2009-10-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

Our class visit to the Center for Learning and Technology (CLT) at the Trinity Library reminded me of the many resources available there that I should take advantage of.

For CS 1300, CLT will be useful when we get to web design. Also, if I run into problems using Photoshop Elements for our assignments, CLT is another resource I can turn to for help. I already used CLT today to watch a DVD on reserve for my Spanish class. I wanted to be able to watch the DVD on the wide screens the Macs in CLT offer. I am interested in taking a digital photography class sometime here at Trinity, and might be able to use the editing tools in CLT for that class.

A personal project I am planning to complete is designing flyers to advertise my sister’s music composition and piano recitals with her picture on it. I will definitely go to CLT so it can look much cooler than what I might have been able to design using the limited design resources on my Mac.

And I know that I will be checking out equipment from CLT in the future when I put on events with the different organizations in which I participate.

I just have to say that Trinity has an awesome library and having CLT makes it even better!

Excel

2009-10-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

I used Excel in the past before taking this class to create member contact sheets for organizations in high school and other similar documents. After completing various assignments and going through activities in class for CSCI 1300, I realized that I had been using Excel very inefficiently. I have learned so many new ways to navigate an Excel spreadsheet and efficiently create documents serving a wide variety of purposes.

I was aware that formulas could be used to calculate data in Excel but was a little scared of using them. I definitely did not know about the “if” function and Excel’s ability to return specified words. I also did not realize that Excel has so many advanced functions such as the ones used for amortization. I feel very comfortable using formulas and functions now. I find the absolute cell references quite helpful and efficient and probably would not have figured out on my own how to anchor a cell reference if I had found myself needing this for a project I was working on. I love the fill handle and know I will be using it often in the future.

One of the frustrations I encountered in the past was not being able to see my column or row headings as I scrolled through a large spreadsheet. I will certainly be spared this frustration now that I am aware of the freeze pane options Excel offers. I had no idea that graphs and charts could be created from data in a worksheet. I am a visual learner and welcome this benefit of getting to quickly see a visual representation of data.

Another new thing I learned is that I can paste graphs and data into a PowerPoint or Word Document. These can be edited from the PowerPoint or Word Document but also reflect changes made on the linked spreadsheet. This knowledge will help me make my PowerPoint presentations more professional.

I look forward to checking out some of the cool templates Excel has for my personal use. As a potential business major, the skills I have learned will also serve me well in my future classes and after graduation.

Searching the Internet

2009-10-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

I found Chris Nolan’s presentation about searching the internet very informative. Even though I learned about the Advanced Search option in Google in another class, I am now aware of additional techniques I can employ to make my searches on the internet more effective. For one, I learned that Google Scholar will retrieve scholarly articles that have been peer reviewed. I can thus avoid the unhelpful websites that appear after a regular search if I am on the quest for sources for a research paper or project. Additionally, I learned that because the order of sites presented in the results of a regular Google search depends largely on how often a particular site is linked on other websites, such a search will not necessarily offer the best websites at the top of the list. Instead, directories such as INFOMINE are a good way to find sites that have been reviewed and determined as quality sites by others. One aspect of the Advanced Search option in Google that was new to me is the ability for a user to limit his or her search to pages that are “free to use and share”. This offers me as a student greater protection against unintentionally committing copyright infringement.

A part of the presentation that pleasantly surprised me is the ability for an internet user to click on a cached version of a website on Google. This is a copy of the website in the Google database. I had no idea there was anything I could do to get around an unresponsive website because it is experiencing too much traffic. This knowledge will save me some frustration in the future when I initially cannot access information I need from an overloaded website.

Response to Pictures that Lie from news.cnet.com

2009-10-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

I chose the Leon Trosky pictures from the website because I did not learn about this famous person in any of the history courses I took in high school. The name was familiar to me, but I wanted to find out who he really was. He was one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution and later founded and commanded the Red Army of the Soviet Union. He was also a member of the Poliburo, the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party. After opposing the rise of Stalin, Trosky was expelled from the party and exiled from the USSR.

The first of the two photos is the original, and includes Leon Trosky surrounded by other officials. The picture next to it is the altered version in which he is no longer pictured. The manipulator removed Trosky and filled in the gap with shades of black to create an illusion of an authentic photo. The photo was manipulated after he was expelled from the Communist Party so the party would not have to acknowledge this “traitor’s” former affiliation with the party.

In my opinion the manipulation was not harmful. It was not powerful enough to rewrite history. We still know today what Leon Trosky’s role in the USSR and Communist Party was, despite efforts by the party to erase knowledge of his former affiliation. I am definitely amused that the party would even attempt to do so with such a prominent figure.

Copyright

2009-09-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

For the Essential Computer Skills class on Tuesday, September 22^nd, guest speaker Jason Hardin, Manager of Access Services at the Trinity University Coates Library, gave a presentation about copyright. One aspect of copyright that he discussed which was new to me is the definition of fair use. I have heard the term in the past but now have a good understanding of its meaning. Fair use is a positive defense against charges of infringement. Four factors are used to determine whether or not reproducing a work, in part or whole, falls under fair use. The first factor is the nature of the work being copied. Copying a work created for commercial purposes is less defensible under the fair use policy than reproducing scholarly or non-profit work. The second factor to consider is the purpose of reproduction. Using someone else’s work for criticism or parody is in accord with the concept of fair use, while reproducing the work to get around paying or to make money inappropriately is not. The third factor is the amount of the work reproduced. Quoting a paragraph or a few lines is more defensible under fair use than burning an entire CD or scanning in an entire book. The final factor is the effect of the reproduction on a rights holder’s profit. If copying a work adversely affects a rights holder’s profit, the action is a form of copyright infringement.

I found an interesting issue concerning copyright and orphan works on Public Kowledge.org. According to Public Knowledge, orphan works are “works whose copyright holders are unknown or who cannot be found.” Currently, users are discouraged from using orphan works because they fear having to pay large damage costs if the copyright holder emerges. Public Knowledge advocates a law that would allow the use of an orphan work “if the user searched for the copyright owner in good faith and with reasonable diligence but failed to find the owner to ask permission.” Additionally, if the owner does appear, Public Knowledge suggests that damages should not exceed a certain amount. Opponents of these suggestions include groups of copyright holders, mostly photographers, illustrators and visual artists. They claim that many of their works become separated from the corresponding copyright information, and that they don’t have the resources to initiate law suits to receive compensation if they find their work being used under orphan status. I agree with Public Knowledge on this issue. So many valuable resources could get lost and should be made available to the public to use under the fair use policy. In my opinion, Public Knowledge’s proposals benefit both the public and emerged copyright holders because the public is not robbed of valuable resources and emerged owners get compensated for their work. Hopefully, the creation of a small claims court for small copyright disputes, as Public Knowledge also suggests, will allow copyright holders to more feasibly defend their ownership rights.

My Network Diagram

2009-09-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

Computer "Survival Skills"

2009-09-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

The best advice I received from Joe Hatch in his presentation is to defragment a computer often. My family's desktop computer at home is very slow, and I always get frustrated when the projects I'm working on seem to take forever to load and complete. Now I understand how a PC saves files and that defragmenting the computer will allow it to run much faster. I will definitely defragment our computer when I go home to visit.

Getting to Know Me

2009-08-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Hello! My name is Vanessa Freckmann and I'm a sophomore student at Trinity University. I haven’t had a nickname since elementary school, and so I go by Vanessa. I was born in Braunschweig, Germany and lived there until my family and I moved to Poteet, Texas, the Strawberry Capital of Texas. I was nine years old at the time. I usually return to Germany every summer to visit my German side of the family. I have one older sister named Yvonne. She is a senior this year at Trinity and majoring in piano performance and composition.

I started taking piano lessons when I was six, joined the band to play French horn in sixth grade, and eventually auditioned for the instrumental music program at the North East School of the Arts (NESA) magnet high school in San Antonio. My family and I moved to San Antonio so my sister and I could walk to school, instead of commuting 45 minutes from Poteet everyday. I continued participating in music when I entered Trinity. I am a member of the Symphonic Wind Ensemble, the professional music fraternity Mu Phi Epsilon, and became the treasurer of the Trinity University Chamber Ensemble (TUCHE) for the 2009/2010 school year.

At Trinity, I am also in the professional business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi, co-president of the conversational Spanish club Venga, and tutor elementary school children in reading through TUVAC, which partners with the San Antonio Youth Literacy organization.

Outside of Trinity, I represent the Land of Virtuosity, a new non-profit performing arts academy in San Antonio, as a member of the Junior Board of Management. Every summer, I return as a junior counselor to the GOLD Youth Leadership Seminar that I attended as a sophomore in high school.

Additionally, I enjoy acting, swing dancing, reading, traveling, watching movies, and creating birthday cards.

I haven’t decided on my major yet but am leaning toward a business degree. Though I am fluent in German, I chose to study Spanish throughout middle and high school, and am continuing to do so at Trinity. I look forward to studying abroad in a Spanish-speaking country next year.

One thing that most people wouldn’t know about me unless they were my family or roommate, is that I organize my clothes by color and even organize the insides of my drawers. I’d definitely call myself a perfectionist.

I feel comfortable using Word and PowerPoint both on a Macintosh and a PC for basic homework assignments. As a senior in high school, I took a computer science class and learned how to use Java. However, I know that I will learn so many more new skills in this course, especially how to build a website.

Vanessa Freckmann

vfreckma@trinity.edu