Silent Coup

This week has been difficult to say the least.

First I had to send emails to Arizona PBS to see if I can interview some of the journalists on the show about fake news and its effects on politics. I realized that I have not done much research about fake news and how exactly fake news is becoming a huge problem. Take this weekend and today for example, when Donald Trump tweeted that Obama had his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower before Election Day. According to CNN, NPR, CBS and other media outlets, it is supposed that Trump tweeted this to a narrative in Breitbart.com titled Mark Levin to Congress: Investigate Obama's "Silent Coup" vs Trump. I believe this type of opinion based "news" falls under the categories of fake news becasue ones opinions are not facts and any fact always has strong evidence supporting it. Sorry I digressed a little. Going back to the emails, I have contacted the volunteer office at Arizona PBS to see if I could do what I had planned and the coordinator emailed me back saying that I could not interview them at the moment but she does have another opportunity lined up for me. At the ASU downtown campus, I can attend this Press, Politics and the Public: Fake News event where I would be able to discuss the impact of fabricated news. The discussion will be lead by Dan Gillmor who is the Professor of Practice and digital media and he will be interviewing BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist who founded “Regret the Error,” a popular site that reports on media errors and trends in accuracy. I am so excited for this event and sad that it is three weeks from now.

Then, I had to email the senior programmer that works for my on-site mentor about the app for the SiREN which is the wearable device. I am currently taking a android studio (software used to build android apps) class on Udemy. I highly recommend Udemy for anyone, beginner or advanced, interested in learning coding, web development, and app development. Anyway, I had to email the programmer to find out how to have XCode (software used to build iOS apps) on my windows laptop. According to my research XCode can only be downloaded on a Mac and I was not interested in buying a new laptop for this internship. The programmer said it is possible to have XCode on windows but they are not the legitimate ways and he would not suggest using them. So, all my Swift iOS training will not be applicable for this internship. Thus, right now I am leaning about how the app for SiREN works and the problems the app currently has so I will keep you posted on that in the blog for next week.

However, I would still like to talk about the iOS training. I built a calculator app using swift and I am pretty proud of it because I did not realize that a calculator would be so hard to make. Note: I had to use my neighbors Mac to make this app so huge thank you to them for letting me do this. Sure I might think it is hard because I am learning swift while making the app but I did not realize that the computer or phone has to constantly remember new information each time the user does an action. That is a lot of information to keep track of and coding that was pretty intense.

Will put a picture of my calculator app later but in the meantime enjoy this gif I found online.

So this week was about finishing my calculator app, learning more about android studio and making an app with that. My biggest challenge for next week is figuring out how to enable users to sign into any app using various services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. I think I need to look more into the backend of app development such as user management but that is a topic for next week.